Crimes of the Future (2022 | USA | 107 minutes | David Cronenberg)
When I walked out of the latest David Cronenberg film, his first feature in nearly 20 years, the first thing I said was that it was the most intense game of Operation I’d ever seen. It got a good chuckle though, much to my chagrin, the next day Neon made essentially the same joke on an Instagram post, ensuring that it will now always seem like I stole my quip. However, I want it to be known in the public record, when the world has been reduced to rubble and we are surviving off of consuming plastic, that there was no such theft.
This may seem like an extraneous observation about a work that certainly is more than just its goofy marketing. Still, this feels like a fitting place to start as the film is abundantly silly in a way that was rather welcome. In the moments where it struggles to stay entirely intact, its humor ended up being the glue that bound the various moving parts together of what proved to be an atmospheric yet ambling body of work. It makes clear that Cronenberg is more than capable of having a bit of fun, often at his own expense, alongside a macabre and moody portrait of a dark future where our bodies have become forever changed.
At the core are Viggo Mortensen’s sickly Saul Tenser and Léa Seydoux’s conflicted Caprice. Partners and artistic collaborators, they work together on live performances where Saul has his organs removed in front of admiring audiences. He has some to spare as his body continues to make ones that he doesn’t need, a condition that has made him famous. This does catch the attention of Don McKellar’s Wippet and Kristen Stewart’s Timlin, members of the strange bureaucratic organization known as the National Organ Registry, who seem to know more than they are letting on. Soon Saul and Caprice get offered an opportunity for a performance that has the potential to alter everything they have come to know both about being alive.
The plot is the least noteworthy and often most laborious aspect of the film, requiring rather exposition-heavy conversations to help us understand the workings of the world. While not uninteresting, it can often make for rather drab scenes where we have little to latch onto. The performances do carry these scenes especially when we see Stewart, in rare form, deliver every line with a bizarre breathlessness that just keeps getting stranger. She seems to only barely be able to utter each word as if she will never speak again while also swallowing it just as soon as it gets out. She gets the best line, “surgery is the new sex,” though largely fades into the background the longer things go on.
It is Mortensen and Seydoux who are the fleshy center of the experience as we see the world largely through their own desires. They almost feel like an old married couple who understand each other more deeply than anyone could, challenging and teasing each other on their quest to provide ever-stranger entertainment to the masses. They also seem to just do it for fun, something we see in the carnal pleasure they get where they cut each other without any real fear of pain. This may make people a bit squeamish though is actually largely restrained and used sparingly, ensuring maximum effectiveness in the key scenes.
The direction of the film becomes almost clinical in the sharpness of its observations. We see how the world has fallen into disrepair in glimpses of boats that have either capsized or been washed ashore. Settings are drab and almost bland, making the flashes of color feel like water being given to someone dying of thirst. Saul spends many such gloomy evenings walking through the streets almost entirely covered in black attire, coughing and groaning like some sort of ailing vampire. While this could be perceived as one-note, Mortensen imbues the character with more subtle ticks and nuances that betray his growing sense of uncertainty with himself.
It is this crisis, which is artistic, personal, and political all at once, that most captures the imagination. Cronenberg has said he wrote the story decades ago, though there is something about it that feels timeless and taut to the point that it could all snap at any moment. When it does, bursting out in gore and violence, it becomes as affecting as any of his best work has ever been. It may take a while to get there though the journey is more than worth it. Oddly, even as it bears basically no resemblance to his prior film of the same name, they share connective tissue both in their themes about the body as an expression of self as well as the final shot as a marker of realization. While imperfect in execution, there is no escaping how Cronenberg more than has the chops to conduct an orchestra of the flesh like no one else can.
You can see Crimes of the Future in theaters starting today.
Header image courtesy NEON.