Crimes of the Future

David Cro­nen­berg belongs to that rar­efied stra­tum of direc­tors whose aes­thet­ic could cred­i­bly be char­ac­terised as a genre unto itself. To this day, any film­mak­er who wades into the slime and vis­cera of ​‘body hor­ror’ can­not evade one par­tic­u­lar adjec­tive: Cro­nen­ber­gian. Yet since 1999’s eXis­tenZ, the direc­tor has been on sab­bat­i­cal from his own icky brand, set­ting aside out­ré grotes­query in favour of more con­ven­tion­al (and con­ven­tion­al­ly legit­i­mate) sub­ject matter.

But it would seem that the ever-undu­lat­ing ​“New Flesh” of Video­drome (1983) and The Fly (1986) couldn’t be sup­pressed indef­i­nite­ly. To watch it find new form and new pur­pose in Crimes of the Future is beau­ti­ful, baf­fling, and exhilarating.

The time: the future. The place: who knows? Bod­ies are chang­ing. Pain tol­er­ance has sky­rock­et­ed, and peo­ple are carv­ing each oth­er up in the street for kicks. What’s more, cer­tain indi­vid­u­als have been sprout­ing mys­te­ri­ous new organs. Or are they tumours? Per­for­mance artist Saul Tenser (Vig­go Mortensen) thinks so.

With the assis­tance of his part­ner Caprice (Léa Sey­doux), Tenser has been rou­tine­ly remov­ing his own mutant organs for the art world’s view­ing plea­sure. He sees it as an act of defi­ance in the face of a dis­obe­di­ent body, a sen­ti­ment that inflames the imag­i­na­tion of Tim­lin (Kris­ten Stew­art), an eccen­tric bureau­crat from the shad­owy Nation­al Organ Reg­istry. Thus begins a labyrinthine (and pos­si­bly non­sen­si­cal) plot full of noirish skul­dug­gery, twist­ed eroti­cism and plen­ty of yuck stuff.

If this all sounds ridicu­lous, it’s pos­si­ble Cro­nen­berg would agree. Despite a per­va­sive atmos­phere of envi­ron­men­tal col­lapse and soci­etal break­down, the film has a cheeky sense of its own absur­di­ty. It’s out­right fun­ny at points, espe­cial­ly when the sub­lime­ly per­vy Tim­lin is on screen.

Cro­nen­berg has always been some­thing of a covert sur­re­al­ist, but the sci­ence-fic­tion­al jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for his images, ideas and sen­sa­tions have nev­er felt quite so ten­u­ous or inci­den­tal as they are here. Long-time admir­ers may find this shift frus­trat­ing, but there’s an unde­ni­able sin­gu­lar­i­ty of vision – one that makes pre­vi­ous works seem dilut­ed in comparison.

Crimes of the Future cer­tain­ly isn’t Cro­nen­berg for Begin­ners. It feels akin to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017): both a career-span­ning roundup of recur­rent tics and fetish­es; both the work of an elder states­man con­tent in only refer­ring to him­self. But, as with The Return, this isn’t a straight­for­ward­ly back­ward-look­ing work. Cro­nen­berg has expressed a cer­tain dis­taste for the term ​‘body hor­ror’, and he’s always seemed con­flict­ed about the rad­i­cal shifts in human biol­o­gy he presents.

While the stric­tures of genre have his­tor­i­cal­ly led him to err on the side of pes­simism, Crimes of the Future leaves us on an opti­mistic note (albeit a cau­tious one). Here we find the ​“Baron of Blood” mak­ing a con­cert­ed effort to lib­er­ate his
anar­chic bod­ies from their pri­or hor­ror con­text. Con­se­quent­ly, Cronenberg’s lat­est feels more like a late-in-the-day course cor­rec­tion than a vic­to­ry lap. It’s a self reflex­ive film, yes, but it isn’t self-congratulatory.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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