Crimes of the Future (2022)

Directed by: David Cronenberg | 108 minutes | horror, drama | Actors: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Don McKellar, Tanaya Beatty, Jason Bitter, Welket Bungué, Denise Capezza, Ephie Kantza, Lihi Kornowski, Nadia Litz, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Scott Speedman

Somewhere along the southern European coast, in the near future, performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) creates new organs in his body. This is an extremely precarious and arduous process of months in which Tenser has the greatest difficulty with basic things, such as absorbing food. Then artistic and romantic partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux), a former top surgeon, extracts the unique organs from Tenser’s body during avant-garde live performances. After a performance, frequent visitor Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman) tells Tenser that his late son is the next step in human evolution. He wants to announce this to the world through the progressive artist. Meanwhile, Tenser and Caprice are hot on the heels of the slimy duo of Timlin (Kirsten Stewart) and Wippet (Don McKellar), government ministry seconds who record and categorize biological anomalies, and the cool detective Cope (Welket Bungué), who investigates a mysterious rebel group. Welcome to the insane world of filmmaker David Cronenberg!

Actually, it is also welcome home for Cronenberg. The Canadian director hadn’t made a horror film for two decades. But as if it were yesterday, the story about Saul Tenser is an intense continuation of personal obsessions and social themes from Cronenberg’s earlier body horror films. As it were, the director, who was also brooding on the screenplay, eats a new winding path through his own oeuvre. “Surgery is the new sex” echoes the desperate slogan “long live the new flesh” and social criticism from ‘Videodrome’ (1983). Worshiping the physical within, organ mutations as coveted metamorphosis, artist Tenser connects himself to identical twin brothers and gynecologists Mantle in “Dead Ringers” (1988) and to the professor, who cultivates and sells his own cancers, in the first iteration of ‘Crimes of the Future’ (1970). As in ‘Crash’ (1996), Cronenberg again explores the relationship between pleasure and pain, sex and death, in a world where pain sensation is the exception rather than the rule. Above all, the director is fascinated by the extent to which human morality plays a role in the definition of the abnormal.

The most surprising and at the same time sometimes nasty thing about ‘Crimes of the Future’ is that it radiates a form of sensuality, even though decay and chaos dominate. Although most people can no longer experience pain in this sinister vision of the future, they are almost completely self-centered, completely turned to the body, constantly looking for some sensation. Extremely tragic of course, because what is the physical, life, without pain and related emotions? However, man is always in transition in Cronenberg’s view; the transhuman is the new normal. And evolution leads to a certain destruction of what is ‘normal’, but the change that proceeds from it also continues life, in whatever form it takes.

Once again, Cronenberg conjures up a film that massages both the body and the mind in unknown places. ‘Crimes of the Future’ is eerie, provocative, intellectual and occasionally even touching. The old hand in the field still knows how to combine sensory horror with artistic and intellectual research into the limits of being human in a very balanced way. Furthermore, the film is a nice neo noir with spicy thriller elements, albeit of the slower kind. Like crimes in the future, Cronenberg’s films come in many ever-changing guises that are often difficult to put your finger on. Don’t let that discourage you, see it as a challenge. Steels therefore feels ‘Crimes of the Future’ as an artistic testament to an extraordinary voice.