Crimes of the Future Review

Crimes of the Future is a sci-fi film by the master of body horror, David Cronenberg. It’s the first film made by the director in seven years and was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

In the near future humanity is rapidly changing. Many people have modified their bodies so they can adapt to the world. Others suffer from Accelerated Evolution Syndrome which means they grow new organs. A sufferer of Accelerated Evolution Syndrome is Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), a performance artist who has his extra organs removed in live shows. After performing one of his shows Saul gets approached by Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman) who offers the artist a chance to perform a post-mortem on his eight-year-old son, a boy that could eat plastic.

Crimes of the Future was one of those films that performed well with critics but poorly with audiences. It has an 80% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and many publications like Empire, Little White Lies, and the Financial Times gave the film highly positive reviews. However, the audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB were a lot more mixed. Crimes of the Future was an acquired taste.

Crimes of the Future was a provocative film. It started with a mother killing her child because she saw him as an abomination which set up a grim tone. It was a world where surgery was performed publicly and people had a morbid fascination with the human body. There was a developing underground subculture of body modification and self-mutilation which was done as art performances and self-expression.

Due to the subject matter, there were a lot of shocking images. Anyone with a phobia of surgery and organs should stay away. There was a wonderfully grotesque sight of a man with his mouth and eyes sewed shut and covered with ears. However, one-character states that the ear-covered man was all for show, and his extra ears didn’t even work. It sums up a lot of the film, shocking for the sake of it.

Crimes of the Future came across as a mash-up of two previous Cronenberg films, eXistenZ, and Crash. The comparison of eXistenZ was pretty obvious because Crimes of the Future and eXistenZ were both sci-fi films that had bio-mechanical machinery. In Crimes of the Future Saul used machinery to monitor his health and organs and the machine used during the ‘performances’ looked like a cocoon.

The comparison to Crash was due to Crimes of the Future being about an obsession with surgery becoming the new sex. People got turned on by the art of surgery and Mortensen did get to do sexual acts with characters 30 years his junior. One scene where two characters did a sexually charged act with a body modification felt a lot like the infamous sex scene in Crash.

Crimes of the Future did have an interesting setup because the world had become so toxic that humanity must make radical alterations to survive. It’s an idea that plays on our current environmental concerns. However, it told the story in the least way possible. Cronenberg was mostly interested in the art movement more than in exploring the world he had created. There were long, portentous monologues about the art, the changes to the body, and why people became interested in this movement.

Mortensen has a good working relationship with Cronenberg. Crimes of the Future marks the fourth time the pair have worked together. Yet in this film Mortensen was mumbling throughout to the point it was difficult to understand him. Because of Saul’s condition, he was coughing a lot and he seemed to be getting sicker as the film progressed, which was similar to Mortensen’s role in The Road who was physically and mentally degrading. The IMDB trivia film stated that Mortensen was in such pain that he couldn’t stand for longer than two minutes. After reading that fact I couldn’t help but notice that Mortensen was sitting or lying down for a lot of the film.

The other two recognisable actors to mainstream audiences were Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart. Stewart’s role was smaller but more notable because she was an odd bureaucrat who becomes interested in Saul and the underground art scene. What was particularly notable was her unusual speaking pattern and ticks. The rest of the cast was made up of Canadian and European actors and no one gave a bad performance.

Crimes of the Future was a film I wanted to like because of the concept and setup, but it was told in an unengaging way. It was wasted potential.