"Crimes of the Future": Surgery might be the new sex, but "boring" is the new Cronenberg

Crimes of the Future (2022)

Nobody makes movies like 79-year-old auteur filmmaker David Cronenberg. This much is true. Perverse, provocative, off-putting, and downright bizarre as only Cronenberg can be, his latest film gets back to the body-based horror after his misanthropic 2015 Hollywood satire "Maps to the Stars." Nearly 40 years ago, technology literally fused with the human body to become “the new flesh” in David Cronenberg’s daringly ahead-of-its-time “Videodrome.” In the new Cronenberg film "Crimes of the Future," “surgery is the new sex," and it turns out “boring” is the new Cronenberg. This is one of those times where the latest film written and directed by a creatively singular filmmaker does not deserve a pass simply because he was missed.

We know for sure that we’re not in Kansas anymore when the film begins with a child eating a plastic wastebasket as if it were a cookie. Then the child’s mother (Lili Kornowski), fearing that he isn’t human, smothers him with a pillow until he stops breathing. This is just in the film’s first few minutes, so we’re not even jumping ahead. Sharing the same title but not actually based on Cronenberg’s second film from 1970, “Crimes of the Future” is set in a synthetic future where human beings no longer feel pain. Human evolution has accelerated, bodies have gained immunity to infection, and surgery is now the new desire, as sex has become old-hat. The mysterious Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) are celebrity-level performance artists who go under the knife in front of a live underground audience. Saul is able to grow entirely new organs, and Caprice extracts them for titillation. When Saul and Caprice have drawn the attention of the National Organ Registry, they meet with registrars Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (Kristen Stewart), who act professionally and record Saul's new organs but really want to be a part of the new art.

In other plot threads that may or may not matter, Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), the father of the aforementioned plastic-eating child and the leader of evolutionists surviving on eating purple plastic bars, later comes to Saul in hopes that he and Caprice will perform “public autopsy” on his dead child. A New Vice detective (Welket Bungué) also privately meets with Saul, who's looking for more information on Lang. Also lingering in the margins are two giggly, possibly psychotic electricians (Tanaya Beatty, Nadia Litz) who may or may not have motives for anything they do. Saul could also be entered into an "Inner Beauty Contest," but it's just another idea that's introduced and then never amounts to anything.

Much plottier than it needs to be with too many half-formed ideas left dangling, “Crimes of the Future” is less than the sum of its parts. There is a human tenderness between Saul and Caprice, but everything else feels so detached and resistant to penetrating any of these characters deeper than skin level. Cronenberg sees no need for further context beyond this small, drab, esoteric world of grotesqueries and its weird details. Many of the details are intriguing enough on their own and tangibly designed that not too much pressure is placed on the viewer to “get it" but to "just go with it." For instance, Saul sleeps on a bug-shaped futuristic bed that helps with his respiratory discomfort, and he must eat in a chair with bone-looking arms that aid with digestion. And when Caprice cuts into him, he lies down in a sarcophagus-looking medical pod that looks like something H.R. Giger might have designed. 

“Crimes of the Future” definitely feels like it's of a piece with 1996's “Crash” (performance artists recreating car accidents for arousal) and 1999's “eXistenZ” (bio-ports being surgically inserted into video game players’ spines). Besides working as a companion piece to the director's other work, this satire of the art (or body modification) world is tantalizing but ultimately garbled in what it’s actually trying to say about human evolution and mostly keeps the viewer at arm’s length. It’s too conceptually fascinating to outright dismiss—and Howard Shore’s industrial, horn-heavy score is hypnotic—but it’s also too inert, uninvolving, and unsatisfying to wholeheartedly recommend.

Other than Viggo Mortensen (who has worked with the director four times before), the actors all prove they are up for anything under Cronenberg’s direction. It’s just hard to judge most of the performances because, apart from a mesmerizing Léa Seydoux and Lili Kornowski (as the mother who does the unthinkable), they all register on the same alien, restrained level. Most interesting of all is Kristen Stewart, who definitely belongs in this strange world. Playing the nervous, by-the-book Timlin with a freaky side, this is one of Stewart’s more mannered and self-conscious performances, yet full of unexpected humor and repressed horniness. As she quivers, enunciates, whispers, and sticks her fingers in Viggo Mortensen's mouth, one doesn’t want to even blink. It’s almost the kind of tic-ridden acting her naysayers used to criticize her for doing during the Bella Swan days, but Stewart is at least making unusual choices all the time before Cronenberg's script ends up having no use for Timlin.

Frankly, it’d be more interesting to hear Cronenberg talk about “Crimes of the Future,” or have an intellectual conversation about it with a friend over coffee or a cocktail, than to actually sit through this windbaggery. Cronenberg still provokes with sufficiently icky body-horror aesthetics—open wounds are licked, and a man whose eyelids and lips are sewn shut and has ears (yes, ears!) all over his body is a ghastly sight to remember—but he really seems to have far less to say than he has to show. Even what he shows is tame by his standards. As “Crimes of the Future” gets into one’s head but never quite worms its way under the skin as it should, perhaps the old flesh was more exciting and thoughtful. 

Grade: C 

NEON released “Crimes of the Future” (107 min.) in theaters on June 3, 2022.