MOVIE REVIEW: Bodily Revolts Become Revolutions in "Crimes of the Future"
I’ve always found it a little awkward approaching David Cronenberg’s body of work. While I revere him as a distinct and challenging voice in cinema, applaud his prolific output and contributions to body horror—amongst other genres—I admit that on a narrative level, his films have a tendency to fall flat for me. This isn’t a dig at Cronenberg the writer; it seems to me an almost prescribed result of his sci-fi concepts being too outlandish to find purchase within expected story formats. This is why I believe that the Cronenberg films characterized by looser, more free-association structures, such as Crash and Naked Lunch, are amongst the Canadian auteur’s best—along with The Fly and Dead Ringers, which are just plain well-executed tragedies (albeit with gnarly twists).
I have neglected to mention the fantastic Videodrome, which feels like an outlier amongst the films I’ve mentioned. This is because the film seems to source its power from being the most unabashedly “Cronenbergian” movie Cronenberg has ever produced. It is the quintessential Cronenberg flick, if you will, and this is why I forgive its story’s shortcomings and let its iconic set pieces steer my enjoyment.
And now we have Crimes of the Future. When word got out about Cronenberg’s latest, discourse seemed hopeful that the film would be in league with films like his 1983 Videodrome—a film characteristic of Cronenberg in its icy and unnerving explorations of the intersections between human bodies and technologies. Indeed, the newspaper description for the film promises exactly that, while also boasting the return of Cronenberg man crush Viggo Mortenson, and a title borrowed from Cronenberg’s 1970 sophomore effort. Cronen-bros and Cronen-babes were set to “eat,” as it were. And while there is plenty worth celebrating this time around, plenty that honours Cronenberg’s roots and plenty that pushes the director forward stylistically, there are aspects of the story that left me feeling like we have, unfortunately, regressed.
Crimes of the Future presents an alternate timeline Earth that has been ravaged by climate change, where physical pain and disease have become almost non-existent, and where advanced biotechnologies make bodily modifications, including “desktop surgeries,” commonplace. Taking full advantage of the fertile ground that is his own body, aging performance artist Saul Tenser (Mortenson) uses biotech and his own “accelerated evolution syndrome” to grow himself new vestigial organs, then has his partner, Caprice (Léa Seydoux), remove said organs in front of live audiences. It’s all quite lurid and transgressive, and while not illegal in the film’s reality, it does inevitably earn Saul an orbiting cast of investigating parties, each of which harbours their own ulterior motives.
While some of these parties pose threats—or, at least concern—to Saul, Cronenberg makes it clear that the avant-garde performer is less focused on the external, and far more invested in the internal. Saul is constantly in the process of growing new organs, constantly spending time in his bio pods—such as his “OrchidBed” and his “Breakfaster”—and thus constantly giving himself away to natural-mechanical processes (“Body is truth”). The performance Mortensen gives is suitably physical, Saul always grunting, straining, and squirming as his body rapidly generates new tissue. The phrase “finding the artist within” holds new meaning here, Cronenberg maybe looking at his own ideas as the abnormal growths inside of him, maybe turning his lens on himself and finding the body horror in his own creative processes, or maybe casting his glance on society at large, trying to envision how individuals might contort themselves physically/mentally/sexually in rapidly changing environments.
The general shape of Crimes of the Future has been gestating in Cronenberg for over twenty years, first having reared itself as an unrealized project entitled Painkillers in 2003, and today it yields rich, sinewy layers of subtext and social commentary. Throughout the film’s runtime, Cronenberg philosophizes in typical dour fashion over the cult of celebrity, cosmetic surgery, bodily autonomy, the body as a political forum, and more, giving his inquisitive audiences plenty to chew on. Unfortunately, many of these topics are left dangling by the film’s end, and the overall treatise Cronenberg may have been shooting for is abstracted and made trivial as a result. Like Kristen Stewart’s character, Timlin, it would seem that we as audience members are only meant to take a perverse interest in Saul and what he represents, but never really get the chance for a full interface (Saul is unable to have “the old kind of sex”). Because of this, Cronenberg seems to be working to distance us from his ideas, while simultaneously exposing us to their innards and giving us some of the most probing, bracing views possible.
Of course, Crimes of the Future can also be digested in terms of its broader strokes—Cronenberg’s musings on society and humanity as they are writ large. There has always been an operatic quality to many of Cronenberg’s films, in the tragic downfalls of his characters, in how he turns the grotesque sublime, and in how he romanticizes the surreal, and these qualities pronounce themselves—at least to some degree—in his latest. Saul’s body could quite literally be the site of a new biological renaissance, his conflict representative both of humanity’s fear of evolution and of humanity’s subversive urge to reroute the natural path. And even if the potency of this angle isn’t all there, you have to admit: Saul does have a Phantom of the Opera vibe going for him.
Opera influences aside, you can also see throughout Crimes of the Future how Cronenberg is being informed by his previous directorial efforts. The film’s alien-looking tools and machines echo those that define Dead Ringers and eXistenZ, while the cosmetic “opening” that Saul comes to sport on his abdomen feels like a very direct nod to the biological VHS port in Videodrome. And while Videodrome proclaims, “long live the new flesh,” the mantra of Crimes is, “surgery is the sex.” While I would hesitate to call Crimes of the Future a “magnum opus” in Cronenberg’s filmography, the film does feel like an almost celebratory amalgamation of some of the director’s most intense obsessions.
Further fleshing out Cronenberg’s world is long-time collaborator Howard Shore, whose twinkling synth score almost sounds like it may have been Daniel Lopatin-influenced, as well as long-time collaborator Carol Spier, whose production design transports you to what feel like the bowels of some lurching ocean tanker. Indeed, Crimes gives us some of Cronenberg’s most enveloping but also un-showy world building. The expressionistic cinematography by Douglas Koch, a first-time Cronenberg collaborator, makes great use of shadows as both zones of menace and dispute, and as the film’s connective tissue.
Cronenberg has a strong control over all of his filmic elements, as well as a focused intent—that much is indisputable. Crimes should also be commended for being one of the director’s most cohesive feeling pictures, with a surprisingly sensitive and introspective side, despite its stomach-churning subject matter. But where the film lands feels disappointingly obvious, unremarkable, and glib, and because it leaves so many narrative threads dangling, it also works retroactively to unravel parts of what came before it. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the conclusion is completely fumbled, I can’t help but think there is more to it that was left on the cutting room floor, more that Cronenberg really wanted to say.
I remain a Cronen-bro, of course, and a strong part of me has to believe that Crimes will grow on me and other audiences with repeat viewings. Furthermore, it is possible that the film may find its footing in the Cronenberg canon as a uniquely self-reflexive effort. Think about it: what are one’s story ideas but weird vestigial organs that grow inside you? When you are a director of renown, what must releasing your films and opening them up to reviews such as this feel like but weird, public surgeries? What body are you reckoning with most but your own body of work? Considering how much Saul resembles Cronenberg, and how much this film is about the artistic process that Saul embodies, this can't be purely coincidence. And even though Saul’s body is showing its age, struggling to keep up with a changing world, what his DNA holds is the potential for new stages of human evolution. In this sense, Crimes of the Future could be the 79-year-old Cronenberg saying that he still has plenty more boundary-pushing ideas inside of him. Or, maybe it's him subtly passing the torch to Brandon Cronenberg, the real-life mutation of his own DNA.