DIRECTOR: David Cronenberg
CAST: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Don McKellar, Scott Speedman, Welket Bungué, Lihi Kornowski, Yorgos Karamihos, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Nadia Litz, Tanaya Beatty, Denise Capezza, Sozos Sotiris, Ephie Kantza, Tassos Karahalios, Jason Bitter, Penelope Tsilika
RUNNING TIME: 107 mins
CERTIFICATE: 18
BASICALLY…: In the future, a performance artist (Mortensen) takes advantage of his unusual regenerative abilities…
NOW FOR THE REVIEW…
Even with all the crazy, insane and utterly unimaginable stuff that’s happened over the last few years, it’s somehow still hard to imagine that it’s been eight years since legendary filmmaker David Cronenberg last made a feature film. Not only that, but the Canadian provocateur has now returned more Cronenbergian than ever, which after such eye-widening displays of gory weirdness like Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Naked Lunch and many others, you wouldn’t think would be possible to achieve.
Perhaps the weirdest thing of all, though, is that this isn’t even the first Cronenberg film to be titled Crimes of the Future. It was also the title of his sophomore feature from 1970, and despite having absolutely nothing else in common, this newer one somehow manages to also share the same enthusiastic level of oddness as the much younger Cronenberg surely did. The key difference here, though, being that his seasoned tenure as a respected genre filmmaker lends much more weight this time around, and you know for a fact going into a David Cronenberg film you’re getting his signature freakish nature in one way or another, and more often than not it makes for a confounding but entertaining time.
Set in an unspecified future, we learn that human evolution has taken a rather bizarre turn; pain and disease have been all but completely eradicated, leading people to have their bodies consciously mutilated for their own pleasure, or for extravagant public display. One pair who indulge in the latter are Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux), a performance art duo who take advantage of Saul’s unusual ability to generate new organs inside of his body, which are then surgically removed in front of an audience. Although the repeated performances have left Saul in a tremendous amount of chronic pain, he’s not too fussed as long as he and Caprice put on a good show. The two of them soon become entangled in an underground plot to expose a radical new genetic alteration, as well as the morbid fascination of National Organ Registry employee Wippet (Don McKellar) and his assistant Timlin (Kristen Stewart).
Needless to say, as with most Cronenberg movies, Crimes of the Future is not for the faint of heart. If you can’t stand seeing people’s stomachs continuously sliced open like it’s an episode of 24 Hours in A&E, or the sight of freakishly augmented human skin (including, among other things, a man whose eyes have been sewn shut and ears plastered all over his body), then God help you if you still decide to watch it. Some of the visuals here do require a pretty strong stomach, but it’s all fascinatingly realised by a filmmaker who knows exactly what boundaries to push while still, miraculously, lending itself an actual human centre. Cronenberg, also the film’s screenwriter, establishes a future filled with grotesque devices – what constitutes as beds and eating chairs in this world are straight out of a H.R. Geiger nightmare – and even stranger characters, whose varying eccentricities make for some interesting, scene-stealing performances. Viggo Mortensen does convincing work as a guy in constant pain, with most of his delivery being noticeably strained and complete with wheezes that barely mask his character’s physical difficulties, and in some scenes you feel both his and Léa Seydoux’s drive for the type of high-end body art they are conducting, including some of their more intimate moments together (including, unsurprisingly for Cronenberg, oral sex with a large gaping surgical wound). Kristen Stewart isn’t in the film quite as much, but when she does show up she does leave a rather chilling presence as someone who, at any moment, seems like they could go full Fatal Attraction if they so wanted.
It’s a fascinating concept and world that Cronenberg has cooked up, but the film does lose its way when trying to put them to good use in a plot that hardly feels like it knows where it’s going. What starts off as a visually interesting satire of the art world, with Cronenberg’s typical penchant for body horror, starts to morph into all sorts of different strands, many of which end up go practically nowhere: it’ll be this weird, Brazil-like dystopian dark comedy sometimes, and then an undercover cop thriller as Mortensen’s Saul – dressed almost fully in black, both looking and sounding like he’s now Batman – is recruited to help take down this underground movement that Scott Speedman is fronting. It can get a little confusing as to what direction we are suddenly headed in with this plot, because while it remains as tonally consistent as it possibly can, the focus tends to bounce around so much that you wonder if it should perhaps have just stuck with one strand instead of tackling them all at once. When it ends on a somewhat ambiguous note, it doesn’t feel quite as satisfying as it perhaps could have been, because so many plot threads are left dangling which are at first set up to be something important, but end up just being footnotes against everything else.
If the overall impact is dampened slightly by its meandering plot, Crimes of the Future is still visually interesting and provocative enough to recommend as a curiosity watch, especially if you’re a massive David Cronenberg fan to begin with and are just excited to see another one of his films on the big screen again. Those who are less able to stomach some pretty out-there gore and violence will easily leave the film feeling particularly squeamish (and understandably so, because some of it can be pretty unsettling), but if you feel like you’ve got what it takes to make it through a weird, freaky movie by one of Hollywood’s most unconventional auteurs, then you’ll have a good enough time with it.
Whatever you end up making of it, though, it’s just cool to have a brand-new Cronenberg movie out in cinemas now. The world’s been such a weird place without him, and now he’s back to make it even weirder for all of us.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Crimes of the Future is a suitably weird return for filmmaker David Cronenberg, displaying some neatly realised world-building with eccentric characters and performances, and an often disturbing fetishization of violence, but a meandering plot softens its intended impact.
