Crimes of the Future (2022)
“Surgery is the new sex”
David Cronenberg’s latest disturbing and shocking creation centres on a dank, dark and dirty unnamed city of a future that was constantly reinforced to me as perhaps a dystopian relic from a near past or for those of a conspiratorial mind, a very near future indeed. One of the film’s very first images is of a large barge or ship idling on its side and rusting away in the shallow waters of a coastal town that is as rusty, industrial, yellow brown and decaying as the stranded ship. Every room or place of interest within this dark and unwelcoming city is badly decaying with paint peeling from every wall and surface, and everywhere is covered in a yellow/brown mold. But rather than the obviously anticipated death that would follow in such a horrendous hellscape, it is life, the creation of life and, rather more pointedly, the creation of artificial synthetic life, that captures the imagination of a rag tag cast of characters within four or five distinct groupings inside the city. With the eradication of physical pain, disease and “no handwashing anymore”, cutting, extreme body mutilations and surgery is clearly regarded as a sexual as well as physical high, whilst a frail old man seemingly stands alone.
He can still feel pain. Chronic pain.
But he has a unique bodily gift.
The cast of characters?
First we have “Saul Tenser” (Viggo Mortensen) and “Caprice” (Lea Seydoux) ostensibly avant-garde performance artists within a far larger circle of similar artists who all share a fascination for extreme body mutilation art and performance. Saul and Caprice have a show entitled “Body is Reality” whereby Saul is surgically operated upon by Caprice live on camera and to a sparse live audience, and his organs removed as the artists get higher and higher on their performance. Other narrative strands comprise of a bemused “Detective Cope” (Welket Bungue) trying to infiltrate the black market and underbelly of an underclass seemingly headed by “Lang Dotrice” (Scott Speedman), an unnerving couple of technical advisors for the Big Biotech Industry that constantly hovers in the background and “Timlin” (Kristen Stewart) and “Wippet” (Don McKellar) two ideologically driven investigators for a hitherto secret organisation known as the “National Organ Registry”.
Kristen Stewart and Don McKellar are particular stand outs as the duality of their characters and motivations become apparent with Stewart in particular scatty, off kilter and quietly disturbing. The same can be said for the central performances.
“Saul Tenser” (Viggo Mortensen) It could be argued that Saul is a living organ donator, a work of artistic expression, a maverick, a visionary or a living, breathing human experiment. He is certainly an inspiration to Wippet and Timlin and loved by his partner in artistic performance, Caprice. Plugged into a pod bed and connected by organic tubes at the wrists and ankles, this is eerily reminiscent of the pods from the original The Matrix film as he experiences an almost daily rebirth as he struggles with his ongoing pain. Whether strapped into a bizarre, skeletal chair or the “Sark” (a futuristic autopsy machine that could be seen as a horizontal birthing pod from the original Alien film), Saul cuts a somewhat ethereal and ghostly figure as well as an often cloaked and face masked wraith.
A quiet and disturbing performance the equal of the character created by director Cronenberg.
“Caprice” (Lea Seydoux) From an original introduction as the somewhat meticulous, methodical and technical half of the performing art duo, Caprice quickly metamorphoses into an idealist, a performer, a darker character who rightly, but snidely describes Timlin as “creepy”, as well as a hyper ambitious and driven performer perhaps needing the high and sensual energy only the extreme surgeries can provide. In love with Saul, a love appreciated but perhaps not truly reciprocated.
Depending on your sensibilities, or in my case, the lack thereof, the central themes of evolution, climate change, a poisoned future, heavy reliance on plastics and synthetics as well as the dark subject matter of transhumanism are all available for debate. The film’s marquee stars, as well as Kristin Stewart, are excellent and huge kudos must be showered in the direction of Howard Shore for his haunting musical score, Douglas Koch for the lighting and cinematography of a pea soup of a film and especially Carol Spier (Production Design), Dimitris Katsikis and Kimberley Zaharko (Art Direction) and Dimitra Sourlantzim (Set Decoration). For the film is atmospheric, brilliantly if ugly decorated in decay and within an almost constant dark tinged fog of putrid and dirty yellow and brown.
But Crimes of the Future ultimately left me as cold and dirty as the graffiti covered walls of decay and destruction that pervade the film. I felt the story was stunted with far too much exposition and far too much repetition that with a sharpened editing knife, could have dropped 15 minutes and tightened up an intriguing if ultimately underwhelming shock horror. The headline article image is included as a warning of sorts as to the graphic up close showings of dramatic and extreme body mutilations, for there are many elongated and lingering shots of dramatic and bloody body cuttings and deep surgical procedures that turned my stomach on a number of occasions.
I honestly didn’t care for this film at all but then again, I didn’t enjoy David Cronenberg’s Videodrome in 1983 or Crash over a decade later. Perhaps I’m a little disappointed as I’ve loved every one of the three films I’ve seen from this director since the turn of the Millennium. A History of Violence (with Viggo Mortensen) is incredible, A Dangerous Method (Viggo Mortensen again) an underrated gem I’ve often returned to since its release in 2011, as well as Cosmopolis a year later.
Disturbing, shocking and graphically adult, Cronenberg’s latest just left me cold.
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Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.