Crimes of the Future
The future looks mightily like erotic body horror in ruined seaside towns.
In a future where humanity is adapting to their synthetic environment, with new transformations and mutations, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) is a performance artist who publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. Along with his partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux), he shocks and enthralls viewers in real time. But he finds his conditions are getting worse, and as the government looks to stamp out Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, Saul comes into contact with Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman) - a man who lost his son, but who wants Saul to show the world how his son had evolved. Saul, along with Caprice, must now consider his most out there performance yet. This work - not just with the child, but with himself - could irrevocably change both himself, and the world.
Directed by David Cronenberg, Crimes of the Future is certainly not for the faint of heart. There’s endless shots of razor blades, scalpels and knives disfiguring faces, conducting ‘artistic’ surgery, and slicing naked bodies in a futuristic simulation of ‘the new sex’. It’s definitely blood soaked, to say the least.
Both Viggo Mortensen and Lea Seydoux are absolutely magnetic in their respective roles, with Mortesen in particular standing out as an at times calmly authoritative artist, and at others a man succumbing to immense pain and internal distress. They make an electrifying pair when on screen together, and feel incredibly futuristic. Some of the surrounding bevy of characters, however, fail to resonate; coming across as alternately too eager, too meager, and too banal to really form a lasting impression.
There’s a lot to visually love about this film, and the staging is often impeccable. Even for those who, like myself, are not huge fans of horror or horror adjacent pieces, the set design and cinematography throughout Crimes of the Future is gorgeous, and works well to convey the futuristic/post-apocalyptic time of the film.
Ultimately, Crimes of the Future falls down where a lot of Cronenberg’s work does; in the execution of its grandiose ideas. From a story perspective, we’re given the briefest of insights into this world, and a lot of the concepts at play are interesting enough to hold movies of their own. But Cronenberg, rather than diving into any of these concepts, instead focuses on the performance art of surgery in this time period, and in doing so delivers a piece that is at once more confusing than it should be, less focussed, and ultimately less interesting. Does it lead to good visuals? Sure. But no more so than could have been done anyway with this concept. More than anything, it posits a world where this performance art becomes the main source of interest in the creative world, and that frankly is a leap to far for the movie to make. It’s such an out there concept that it untethered the rest of the interesting and well founded elements of the story, creating a piece that felt art driven, rather than story driven.
