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Film Review: Crimes of the Future
Leading up to its premiere at Cannes, all the media surrounding Crimes of the Future focused on director David Cronenberg’s comments that he expected mass walkouts. Looking at the origin of the comments, an interview with Deadline, reveals Cronenberg is half serious when he talks about audiences being so disgusted they walk out. He ends, “However, I have no idea really what’s going to happen.” An answer to a previous question had him explaining, “as usual…I’m not making a movie to shock people or assault them.”
What a shame. One of our most visionary living directors, a man whose name has become a byword for body horror, comes back from an eight-year hiatus to return to the genre to which he’s synonymous, and all the headlines treat it like it’s the fourth installment of The Human Centipede. Online reviewers bring up the fact there weren’t mass walkouts as if it’s a knock against the movie.
Crimes of the Future is not a remake of Cronenberg’s 1970 feature of the same name, a no-budget arthouse movie I haven’t seen and neither have you. It takes place some indeterminate amount of years in the future in a world where some humans grow extraneous organs. Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortenson) is one of those humans. His partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux) removes these organs before a rapt audience. These art performances see Saul held in a machine called a Sark with an exterior like a carapace and windows opening to his face and abdomen. Caprice uses a scarab-shaped device to control multi-jointed knife-tipped appendages inside the Sark.
These surgery scenes are what would supposedly drive droves of people out of the theater. Truth be told, nothing here is particularly disturbing, at least to the sort of person who would go to a David Cronenberg film. In this future, humans have lost the ability to feel pain or get infections (wouldn’t be enough for me to go under). What makes the scenes endurable is how they’re shot. The most disturbing aspect—that Saul is conscious during the procedure—is obscured. The windows of the Sark separate his face from his body. The camera doesn’t focus on both at once. When the scalpels dig in, we’re looking at a disembodied torso. True to form, Cronenberg’s attitude toward his subjects is clinical.
Caprice (Lea Seydoux) and Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen).
There’s also the weirdness of everything: the crustaceous look of the Sark, Caprice’s gown on which the remote device is attached over her solar plexus, the fact they stage performances in stark, crumbling warehouses with CRT TVs giving the crowd a close-up view, Howard Shore’s score whose snyths and organs bring along a wonderment, a grandness. With strangeness comes a certain abstraction that makes the gore easier to bear. These scenes do feature the one flaw brought on by budgetary restrictions. Sometimes the Sark’s windows and scalpel legs are computer-generated. It’s not the worst CGI, but it is noticeable.
The most believable aspect of this future is the existence of a government agency that catalogs all newly evolved organs. One of the bureaucrats at the National Organ Registry is Timlin (Kristen Stewart) who is enthralled with Saul’s innards. Stewart exploits her guarded demeanor to unsettling results. Her words exit her mouth in a breathy staccato in what seems to be their only means of escape. In one neatly blocked scene, the two sputter through a conversation, while she advances and he retreats until they’ve inched their way to the back of the room, and she springs on him a mouth inspection followed by a kiss that arises from obsession and not passion.
Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (Kristen Stewart) are agents of the National Organ Registry.
The plot also involves a government agent who has clandestine meetings with Saul, a subversive group who eat purple rectangles, and a pair of perky mechanics. “Plot” may not be the precise word. The film is not aimless, nor avant-garde, but woe be those who need the comforts of conventional narrative. Cronenberg entrusts the audience to make conclusions. If you want to be as reductive as saying he’s making a statement, it’s an interrogative one, not declarative. That’s not to say it’s mere inkblot. The themes Cronenberg investigates here are ones he’s eyed his whole career: obsession and its tolls, the effects of technology, the inescapable relationship between us and our bodies.
Watching the movie feels like being a medieval peasant seeing 2022, glimpsing a world whose culture and conditions are the result of centuries of forces unknown, whose inhabitants’ actions and motivations are vaguely understood, an alien world. It is a surprising film, not as dystopian as it appears, focusing not on the failings of the body, but rather its radical potential. It is also good-humored, well aware of its rank absurdity. More than any other film I saw this year, I want to rewatch this one. I’ll catch details I didn’t notice on first viewing. Of course, the same could be said for even the awfullest movies. Crimes of the Future isn’t good because it requires you watch it a second time, but because it entices you to.
Klinek (Tassos Karahalios) is a performance artist.
Once again The Simpsons did it first:
Well
Weird
A Planet Named Sheol, Cordwainer Smith
I’ll pass thanks.
The Critical Drinker refers to Kristin Stewart as mouthbreather so it sounds like she’s playing the role she always does.
Anyway if body horror was my thing I’d just google an abortion or read about transgender surgeries on teenagers.
I appreciate the review. This one isn’t for me.
Sounds like great family entertainment . . .
It sounds weird and pointless. Thanks for the heads up.
A Planet Named Shayol (1961). The extra organs are harvested for medical purposes, rather than perverse excitement, as in the Cronenberg film.
BTW, the way to guard against movies like Crimes of the Future is to check the audience reviews on RottenTomatoes, especially negative reviews. They will give you the down and dirty that the critics (who mostly review a film’s politics, these days) and super-fans tend to conceal. It’s how I was warned against The Menu and Bones and All, among current films.
Great story, and Smith is one of my favorites of all time. From what TGS explains of the movie, the organs growing from people is about the only similarity.
Just caught this one today.
It’s not as if Cronenberg hasn’t waded or dived deeply into this stuff before, which isn’t to say it’s duplicative. It’s certainly mildly discomforting, but it’s not a gross-out kind of movie, that’s not the point and never has been. His pure narrative approach, almost clinically shooting the movie (someone else made that observation and it sticks for me), the conversations and the slowness of the pace, are what interrupt the normal expectations of narrative.
Which might be the bigger point. He’s used or is using the same ideas about technology moving faster than humanity ever has before, and how humans are changed by it, either through adaptation, adoption, or refusal, and what that *could* mean, if you just take that idea a step or two out into darkness.
Videodrome was a trip (and a treat for those of us who mildly slavered over Deborah Harry back in the day). And that’s from 1983. Even in conventional films Cronenberg has made (like Eastern Promises, which is not a horror movie but features his favorite actor Viggo Mortensen), there’s a rending and tearing of the flesh that seems to be part of the oeuvre, sort of can’t help himself (even if it’s just a naked knife fight; bonus: Viggo balls!).
It was certainly odd, and I’m glad I watched it, but I’m pretty sure I’m not interested in seeing it again. I’m a bit slow, I’m confident I’m missing a lot even in conventional flicks, just not sure it’s worth the ride again.
Need to see Barney dance with those on, though.
For someone “a bit slow” you nailed the intent behind the movie. I think it’s normal to not fully comprehend a piece of art the first go around, and the fact of it making you ponder is the goal, not that you “figure it out.” Personally I’m dying to watch it again once the 4K comes out (one month away).
Cronenberg’s passions and style have remained consistent. Eastern Promises and A History of Violence are strangely clinical. You admire his movies rather than like them. And that bathhouse knife fight is a scene for the ages.
That fight scene made me more uncomfortable than anything in Crimes of the Future.
The underground movement stuff, radicalism – just clicked for me that Scanners strongly embraced this same idea, too, with these weird semi-political groups, based on induced changes to human capabilities (a corporation sells a pregnancy sedative that creates Scanners).
This scene in Scanners with the big heads, they literally go inside them – just popped into this head, this morning. That’s Robert Silverman, his creepy acting in this flick stuck with me.
That scene is something that could happen in real life, and filmed as such. Everything in Crimes of the Future is pretty disconnected from reality as we know it and hence easier to distance yourself from.
I need to return to Scanners. I liked it a lot, but it’s been forever and I barely remember anything outside of the infamous cranial eruption. I’d probably have a new appreciation now that I’ve seen a lot more of Cronenberg’s films. This year I caught up on The Dead Zone and Dead Ringers. The former testifies to his ability to make movies of broader appeal without compromising his artistic integrity. Next to The Fly, it’s his most human film, and definitely the least Cronenbergian.
Dead Ringers showed him venturing further outside of horror while exploring his same obsessions. It’s a difficult, near impenetrable film, but always fascinating. There are still plenty of gaps in my Cronenberg viewing history, and Existenz is the most glaring. (I’ve got a review of Crash somewhere that I need to tidy up and post one of these days.)
eXistenZ was ok, but if you’ve read Jeff Noon’s Vurt it loses some wow-factor.