‘Surgery is the new sex…’
David Cronenberg has earned the right to do whatever the fuck he wants. Movies like The Brood, Scanners and The Fly have ensured that the Canadian director will always be a legend in horror circles. While his other work is up and down, it’s always interesting. I didn’t really enjoy eXistenZ, Spider or Dead Ringers, but they certainly weren’t boring. Every now and again, Cronenberg meets his audience halfway in films such as A History of Violence or A Dangerous Method, and sometimes he just goes plain wild such as with Naked Lunch or Crash. Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg’s first film in eight years, is possibly his most bizarre…
In a world in which humans have begun to adapt to a synthetic environment, performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) grows extra organs inside himself so that his partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux) can cut them out in front of a live audience. The two of them debate whether to perform a live autopsy on a child that survived solely on eating plastic. Absolute madness. Even for Cronenberg.
Let me begin by saying the plot is pretty unintelligible and the characters are cold and inhuman. We have absolutely nothing or nobody to root for here, and this makes for a cinematic experience that is emotionally empty. Never a good starting point for any art. Mortensen and Seydoux try their best with what they are given, but there is so little here that makes sense that it’s difficult to find the life raft of normal plotting amidst a sea of bewilderment. Kristen Stewart elevates every scene in which she appears, as she so often does, but that doesn’t stop Crimes of the Future from being too arty and avant-garde to ever threaten to be an enjoyable experience.
That being said, Crimes of the Future is visually wonderful, mostly with practical effects, with much of the nightmarish imagery stuff that H. R. Giger would be proud of. The combination of sex, violence and death is familiar territory for Cronenberg, and he explores it with reckless abandon here – the images he conjures are vivid and unforgettable. Unfortunately, it simply isn’t enough to make sitting through Crimes of the Future worthwhile.
If this is to be David Cronenberg’s final feature film, and at 79 years old that seems likely, it is fitting that he should sign off with something so esoteric, so strange and so unintelligible, If nothing else, this is a David Cronenberg movie.