Mark Reviews Movies: CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022)

Crimes of the Future, NEON

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 2, 2022

Unnecessary surgery is art and sex, as well as potentially illegal, in the futuristic world of Crimes of the Future. Writer/director David Cronenberg's return to the kind of body-based horror that made him famous is certainly intriguing on a story level, tantalizing on a thematic one, and gross on an aesthetic one. Unfortunately, Cronenberg seems a bit too comfortable to keep this material at those superficial levels.

It does, at least, make for a series of shocking and darkly amusing details near the beginning, with those tones existing in close proximity between scenes or co-existing within the same one. Take the prologue, for example, which revolves around a mother (played by Ephie Kantza) and her young son, who has a peculiar palate, to say the least.

We watch the mother, frustrated and defeated to an almost existential degree with her son, keeping a close eye on the boy, warning him not to eat any of the junk that has washed up on the beach where he's playing. It's no facetious or empty word of threat, though, because the son can and does munch on a plastic garbage bin later. As for the mother, she smothers the boy with a pillow after discovering his latest snack. During this opening sequence, the weird, the horrific, and the tragic merge in a way that shows Cronenberg still possesses the capacity to surprise—not only with the extremes within a narrative (beginning with the cold-blooded murder of a most unusual child), but also in terms of how the various, seemingly disparate tones within this prologue blend so efficiently.

The rest of the tale, which goes in a completely different direction before coming back around to the purpose of those opening scenes, is even stranger and more gruesome, while giving us even more disjointed tones that somehow fit together within the odd concoction of this world. The same can't be said of the many, half-baked ideas Cronenberg has in store, but that there's some consistency here is worthy of some appreciation.

At this point, we meet Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), a performance artist, and his professional partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux). The current trend of art in this futuristic world involves live surgery and other forms of body modification, and here, a bit more background information is required. In this future, human beings are evolving more rapidly, and most people have lost the ability to feel pain and gained an immunity to infections (That's quite convenient, considering the main gimmick of Cronenberg's story).

Like others, Saul grows new organs within his body, and a typical performance has Caprice using an elaborate machine to remove those novel organs, which she tattoos prior using an endoscope, in front of an audience. Yes, Cronenberg uses some impressive effects to show those performances, and yes, they're convincing enough to be simultaneously disgusting and humorous, if only because of how over-the-top the entire premise is.

Everything else about this story seems to come as an afterthought to the grotesque spectacle of Saul and Caprice's work. There's a pair of weirdos, Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (Kristen Stewart), who work at an off-the-book registrar for new organs and whose job feels more like an excuse to get close to celebrities like Saul. They blather on about art and beauty—and, in Timlin's case, sex—with the performers, as if the mere existence of such conversations in this story will add some weight to it. The images of those surgeries—including another artist who has a surgeon slice deeply into her face—and other modifications—such as a man whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut and whose body is covered in ears—overpower any attempt at explaining them, especially tries as shallow as these.

Another plot thread involves a police detective (played by Welket Bungué), who's looking to use Saul as a source for some unknown investigation and whom Saul eventually contacts to find out about the murdered boy from the beginning (It's as if the former is just an excuse for the character's usefulness for the latter). Yet another features a pair of technicians (played by Tanaya Beatty and Nadia Litz), who specialize in Saul's machines—of strikingly organic design—and might be up to something else, and eventually, there's the dead boy. His father (played by Scott Speedman) wants Saul and Caprice to perform a live autopsy of his son's body. The boy might prove to be a next step in human—if people could still refer to whatever the boy has become as that—evolution.

For as busy as the plot is, most of it feels like a plate-spinning act, and the crowded nature of the narrative means there's little room to examine these characters or even explain what's happening in a comprehendible way. Crimes of the Future is full of curiosities, presented with a strong sense of style and the bizarre. The movie's downfall, though, is that it's not curious about those elements on a level deeper than how thoroughly odd they are.

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