Unrelated to his 1970 featurette of the same name, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future posits a time in which “surgery is the new sex” amid human evolution’s next giant leap.
Starring in his fourth Cronenberg film, Viggo Mortensen plays Saul Tenser, a man whose body grows new organs. His blood and guts make the ideal canvas for performance artist Caprice (Léa Seydoux, No Time to Die), who tattoos these organs and, in full view of spectators, removes them via remote-controlled device of crab leg-like bony things tipped with scalpel blades. It slices, it dices, responding to Caprice’s every push of a gamepad, which looks not unlike a frog and strongly recalls the director’s 1999 effort, eXistenZ. As Tenser and others undergo the procedures, they moan in orgasmic ecstasy — and with an acceptable amount of camp — at each cut.
Enter Kristen Stewart (2019’s Charlie’s Angels) as part of a shadowy organization that registers people’s organs, Scott Speedman (The Strangers) as the father of a kid who eats plastic, and the foregone conclusion that Cronenberg is not operating in accessibility mode à la A History of Violence, his first collaboration with Mortensen, the DiCaprio to his Scorsese. Did I mention the dancer (Tassos Karahalios) with several dozen ears and a sewn-shut mouth and eyes?
As par for Cronenberg’s course, Crimes of the Future finds him bringing an inherently intriguing premise full of Big, Intellectual Ideas. What ultimately keeps this film’s from success is how less-than-fully fleshed-out the speculative execution seems, in part due to an overly talky script. The auteur’s unmistakable and unmatched eye for set design, however, is present and alert, from a pulsating umbilical bed to a tooth-laden feeding chair with herky-jerky moves like the 4D motion seats at your local multiplex — you know, the theater chain likely not playing this movie.
Intentional or not, this is Cronenberg as close to alienating the mainstream as possible. I say “close” only because at no point does a character sexually penetrate an open wound — and certainly not for a lack of opportunity. That’s too bad, because Crimes of the Future could use a car Crash or four. —Rod Lott