Crimes of the Future (2022)
David Cronenberg's return to the craft and, moreso, return to the style of movie that made him a household name. "Body Horror" is the term, though his squelching, fleshy noir's, say Videodrome, EXistenZ or Naked Lunch, have always been something seperate from what one would generally associate with the genre of horror. CotF is no different, playing almost like a biopunk riff on Blade Runner, though even moreso than Blade Runner it's a movie that feels much richer in textures and allegories than it does in actual moment to moment narrative.
CotF focuses on performance artist Saul Tenser, played by Viggo Mortensen, and his partner Patrice, played by Lea Seydoux. What does their performance art look like, you ask? Well, Tenser has a never elaborated upon, but implicitly not uncommon, genetic condition that makes him grow additional organs inside his body. In their performances, Patrice surgically removes these organs in front of a live audience. In the world of CotF, you see, pain and disease have been eradicated, so this and other forms of extreme body art can be performed without great risk. This abrupt and radical change in the human body is eyed suspiciously by the powers that be who have established a number of new institutions to survey and control those capable of altering their bodies, most notably a group of people who have found a way to digest plastic and even genetically pass on that ability to their offspring.
So, as you might have surmised, this is kind of a weird movie. It's certainly one of those "late career" type projects, the sort of thing that gets made when directors are so confident in their personal sensibilities that their intent is to shamelessly revel in in them with no attempt to packabe them in a way that's digestible. How much one might enjoy these projects tends to depend on how much of the artists fascinations they personally share. Which is why I can call something like Inland Empire, in all its grainy, murky, labyrinthine eccentricity, one of my personal favourite movies and got a lot of enjoyment Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, even if it did feel more like a full immersion experience into 70's Los Angeles than a narrative movie. If you aren't 100% alligned with them, though, watching those movies can be a rather tedious experience, and Crimes of the Future did occasionally cross over into that tedium for me, albeit between ideas that are actually pretty compelling.
While I like quite a bit of Cronenberg's output, I never really clicked with some of its more openly fetishistic elements. Cronenberg is one of those people who seem to view the relation between pain, lust and the violation of the human body by foreign objects as self explanatory. Me, personally, I don't. No matter how often Cronenberg presents various artificial orifices being fondled, I just don't see what's so damn fascinating about it. So when Kristen Stewart, as a government employee discovering her fascination with Tenser's work, puts forward the thesis that "Surgery is the new sex", I simply don't see where it's coming from. And, mind, I'm saying that as someone with a preference for women who had some extensive plastic surgery done. What's so hot about being cut open if, by the end, you don't even have a bigger pair of tits to show for it?
Cronenberg is at his best when he uses the violation and alteration of the human body as a visual shorthand for the violation and alteration of the human mind. As a short aside, I watched Videodrome in preperation for Crimes of the Future, but it's a movie that's much clearer about what it's actually about. When protagonist Max Renn, played by real life brainwashing victim James Woods, gets gradually transformed into an assassin for two competing secret societies waging a war for the human mind, there is a clear intent of having his physical mutations reflect the mind altering properties of the televised propaganda he's exposed to. CotF seems overall more interested in the visuals then in what they represent.
The film certainly throws a lot of ideas out there. Due to his condition, Tenser has to rely on H.R. Giger-esque biomechanical contraptions for basic bodily functions such as eating or sleeping. People eating nutrition bars made from plastic. Organ registration offices. It sure is some pretty wild stuff that Cronenberg's imagination brings to the screen, but CotF seems to be content in showing it but not very interested in using it. Sure, there's subtext to it. It's easy to read the bureaucratic control of the altered human body as a metaphor for surgical gender reassignment, or abortion, or, for all I know, eugenics. The mutation of the human body to digest plastic as commentary on environmental pollution and its consequences for biological life. Tenser as a standin for Cronenbergs himself, unsure whether he should embrace or purge himself from the things that are at the core of his artistic work. Ideas that are fun to meditate on, for sure, but the movie wants you to do its thinking for it.
It's all very interesting and thought provoking, certainly. It looks quite beautiful, on what's obviously a limited budget, Cronenberg creates a dystopian society that shows humanity at a crossroads between evolving away from itself, or being increasingly incapable of actually inhabiting the world it created. The dialogue tends to dwell in the same space as the visuals, communicating ideas and concepts more than emotions and motivations, but the actors manage to deliver it in a way that lends it some humanity and personality that the content often lacks. But as it keeps making you guess at where it's all going, the ending will hit you with the revelation that it isn't really going much of anywhere. The thunderclap finality that tied together Videodrome or Naked Lunch is absent from Crimes of the Future, it leaves these characters and the strange world they inhabit mostly as it found them, maybe with a revelation or two richer.
Crimes of the Future is a movie that's interesting, but frustrating. It creates a very weird and very immersive world to inhabit, but also doesn't seem interestend in doing more than just inhabiting it. It's a movie contemplating quite a lot of things, but reluctant to share its conclusions on them. This philosophy gives it a sense of inertia. It's a showcase of ideas and aesthethics, a lot of them quite fascinating for sure, but it's very conent with them just being there. The exploration of these ideas is left to the viewer, as any exploration the movie itself does is surface level at best.
