Movie Review : Crimes of the Future (2022)
The difference between movie director and film auteur is exemplified by the work of David Cronenberg. More than mere entertainment, his films are objects you develop a relationship with. They stay with you long after you’re done watching them and your understanding of their themes develops with time, viewings and maturity, like it does with a great novel. If great authors tend to lose their fastball with age, it didn’t happen with Cronenberg. His new film Crimes of the Future is mean as fuck.
Crimes of the Future tells the story of a performance artist named Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), who artistically removes organs his body randomly generates along with his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux). In the not-so-distant future where they live, certain humans started generating extra organs and everybody is freaking out trying to understand what it means. Is this evolution or a sign of the end times? As usual, people are warring over what they don’t understand and it’s up to artists to make sense of it.
Surgery is the new sex
Crimes of the Future is David Cronenberg at the peak of his body horror form. It is gloriously fucked up, but not devoid of purpose. What makes it so great is that it has an unanswerable question at its heart: what do you do with people who are developing extra organs? Do you study them? Do you try and heal them? Do you declare them genetic deviants? Saul Tenser offers an alternative to the creeping uncertainty: he takes personal responsibility over the suffering they cause.
Everyone thinks Saul Tenser is the fucking coolest for doing it, because he’s the only public figure who is directly addressing this accelerated evolution syndrome. In a world where pain is disappearing, people are flocking towards what makes them feel any emotion at all. Kristen Stewart’s character Timlin (she is the coolest in this movie) even says it to Saul: surgery is the new sex. Taking control of your body for best or worst is the one way to show agency over a world changing way too fucking fast.
What the fuck does it really mean and why is it so haunting? Well, I believe Crimes of the Future is (first and foremost) a film about the process of attributing meaning to something. It’s about plenty of other things too, but it really circumvents around Saul Tenser’s inner conflict between his nature and his choices. He arbitrarily attributes meaning to his condition, while it develops a completely separate one on its own. His art revolves around the conflict between existence and essence.
His conflict mirrors the conflict around the fate of Brecken (Sozos Sotiris), a child who is brutally murdered by his own mother in the opening sequence of the movie for being different. As it is often the case between adults who claim to be rational, they decide of their own fate by dealing with the fate of a child. in Crimes of the Future, meaning is arbitrary. It is given and taken by emotional creatures incapable of inhabiting their own body and make sense of primary emotions. It’s a scary ass place.
The fun part of David Cronenberg’s movies
Now, David Cronenberg movies aren’t great because they’re moral cautionary tales. Plenty of movies are. No, a movie like Crimes of the Future is unique and unforgettable because it’s excessive and hyperbolic. It is set in a world where people are starved for emotion. Where a man like Saul Tenser is sought after like a drug pusher and it gets CRAY-ZAY. There’s a running gag through the movie where women either want to fuck him or get aroused by him. It features a lot of gratuitous nudity.
Set in Cronenberg’s trademark retro-futuristic aesthetic, Crimes of the Future is colourful, but grimy. Cartoony, but ultraviolent. Characters don’t feel real and neither should they. They are stereotypes navigating difficult existential question, mirroring an image of our binary understanding of the world. The only character you’re supposed to feel something for is Saul Tenser, because he’s mirroring the creator of this movie. An aging artist, hesitating to embrace the future. Him and the kid (sort of).
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Crimes of the Future is a freakin’ trip. It is not exactly meant to entertain you in the conventional sense of the term, but the overpowering visuals it creates and the morally compromised world it inhabits will live with you for a lot longer than any car chase of set explosion would. It is an elegant, understated update on older films like Videodrome and Dead Ringers. David Cronenberg’s still got it. Crimes of the Future is everything we wanted it to be. Go see it.
