Skip to content
Introduction
David Cronenberg is an acquired taste. He has always been, and not because of the often cross-border nature of his subject. The cold, stilted performances. First-year philosophy class dialogue. The almost defiant framing of scenes to be as objective and unglamorous as possible (all wides and two-shots, a bit of dynamic lighting when not needed). These have become staples in his personal style.
Cronenberg made a name for himself in the body horror world with early thrillers like The Brood (1979). He then began switching to more cerebral, high-brow food with 1996’s acclaimed (and controversial) Crash. This trend fully culminated in the 2005s A story of violence. This would be his first outing with frequent collaborator Viggo Mortensen. Now the director has returned to his roots with The crimes of the futurea cool, heavy, at times ugly sci-fi drama that has just had its world premiere in Cannes.
Reason
In the not-so-distant future, humans have evolved past the need to feel physical pain. This creates a world of fetishized physical violence. At the center of the story are performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and his girlfriend, Caprice (Lea Seydoux). Saul suffers from Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, a condition in which he has begun to cultivate new and unique organs. As part of their performances, Caprice performs a live operation on Saul in front of a seduced audience. She removes the malignant body parts that eventually grow back. For her, it is symbolic that makes sense to the body and the physical reality. For him, it is a rebellion against nature. It is also a middle finger for a biological process. The result is that he is pulled away from humanity and pushed towards something new.
The couple’s holdings attract the attention of the National Organ Registry. It’s an incipient operation led by the bureaucratic Wippet (Don McKellar) and his timid, repressed assistant, Timlin (Kristen Stewart). Wippet sees Saul’s accelerated development as a disorder that must delay medical intervention. Timlin, meanwhile, becomes fascinated by Saul after seeing a live performance. He boldly declares that “surgery is the new sex.”
Meanwhile, a young boy is murdered by his mother in a contemporary but ultimately related story. This is after he has developed an insatiable appetite for plastics and other synthetic materials. We eventually learn that he is not alone as Saul crosses paths with a strange subculture of plastic eaters. They shape themselves as freedom fighters against an oppressive state that sees them as freaks. Could it be that this is the new phase in human evolution? A desire for synthetic materials to better adapt to an increasingly synthetic world?
Analysis
Much could be read in The crimes of the future as an allegory. Climate change, for one, in relation to the aforementioned plastic eaters and the government’s reactionary setback to the inevitable evolution of human biology. And, of course, the state’s stranglehold on bodily autonomy. Most notably, however, the film seems to be a commentary on the artist’s eternal dilemma, doomed to spend his life searching for and creating meaning out of pain (or lack thereof).
Saul seems a lot like an autobiographical stand-in for Cronenberg. In a crucial scene, he goes to see a piece by a fellow artist, a modern dancer who has sewn his eyes and lips closed and shaped ears all over his body. It’s a bold, disturbing image and was one of the most eye-catching stills from the film’s trailer. In contrast, the artist in the film is greeted with a lukewarm response. He is a better dancer than a conceptual artist, says a spectator. Very style over substance.
In a way, this seems to be Cronenberg’s statement against other, newer artists who have grasped his style in the most superficial terms, focusing on the sterile shock value without any of his signature meditations on themes such as reality, identity and technology or mortality. It’s also a clever admonition towards a more relaxed audience, lured in by the promise of prurant body-shivering thrills only to be greeted by a film that is much more understated and quietly contemplative than they would expect.
This movie will not be for everyone. The topic is close and the dialogue explanatory. There is a lot of world-building to be done in a short time and some loose threads are never tied up. In fact, it feels as if the film’s third act has simply been cut off as an unwanted body part. Cronenberg seems to be happy to give the viewer a hard time. Many parallels have been drawn between him and co-author David Lynch for this reason, though Lynch’s oeuvre is more emotional dream logic, rather than Cronenberg’s icy philosophical pondering.
Cast
The crew is excellent. Mortensen has been a Cronenberg muse ever since A story of violence, and Seydoux also fits perfectly into his world, all the icy glare and cool arthouse embellishments. However, it is Kristen Stewart who really steals the show with her small role. She undermines any expectation one might have had of being cast as a dystopian femme fatale and is instead presented as an awkward, monastic, erotic neurotic bureaucratic pencil pusher. In Cronenberg, she has finally found a director whose style fits perfectly with her jerky, nervous energy, and it would be nice to see what she could do with a bigger role in a future film of him.
Conclusion
It will be interesting to see when the dust has settled where cinephiles and Cronenberg acolytes are located Crimes of the future in their ranking of the director’s work. It seems that many viewers will see his return to body horror as a regression, a retreading of old ground, while others will see it as a development and expansion of many of the themes that have defined his filmography.
It is useful to see it in the context of his landmark work Videodrome, a film that presented a gloomy and nihilistic view of the future and technology and gave cult film fans the infamous phrase “Long live The New Flesh”. But Videodrome (1983) was a fearsome pondering about the surplus of mass media entertainment, in which the protagonist is mutated and annihilated by his exposure to sinister forces at stake. The crimes of the future It almost feels like an inversion of this, with the protagonist undergoing a bodily mutation that, while perhaps not explicitly positive, could be seen as a natural and potentially optimistic step towards the future. Long live the new sex.
Read more reviews from Cinema Scholars!
RED ROCKET: A review of Sean Baker’s latest
Disney’s ENCANTO: A Review of the Animated Musical
Stay up to date with Cinema Scholars on social media. Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
Related