It’s in the unsettling, eerily prophetic ideas it dishes out that Cronenberg’s latest body-horror foray finds its most shocking material.
By Leonardo Goi
“People will say, ‘Oh, he’s back to body horror; he’s doing the same stuff he always did,’” David Cronenberg told Adam Nayman in a recent New Yorker profile of the 79-year-old Canadian director. “But it’s never changed for me. My interest in the body is because, for me, it’s an inexhaustible subject—and of the essence of understanding the human condition.” Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg’s first feature in eight years and his first time working from an original script since 1999’s eXistenZ, continues his career-long journey into the mysteries of our anatomy and the boundary-pushing relationship between flesh and technology.
Set in a rusty wasteland of shipwrecks and dank alleys, where physical pain has been eradicated and body organs seem to be everyone’s obsession, the film follows a couple of performance artists, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux). Riddled with a medical condition known as “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome,” Saul’s body is spawning new and inexplicable organs, which Caprice excises in front of live and spellbound audiences. It’s a gruesome and viciously captivating show that’s turned Saul into a celebrity, haunted by fans and government officials who, like Don McKellar’s Wippet and Kristen Stewart’s Timlin, can barely hide their awe for the man and his abominable gift.
Speaking to Deadline on the eve of the film’s Cannes premiere, Cronenberg himself had prophesied a gnarly, gory spectacle set to trigger endless walkouts and panic attacks. (He elaborated a bit in a different conversation with Variety, musing that “the worst thing is if your movie is boring, and I’ve been [to] some screenings in Cannes where nobody walked out but nobody cared about the movie either.”) Curiously, much of the (ittedly scarce) negative response Crimes has so far attracted seems to pivot on its failure to live up to that promise. Put otherwise, the film is seen as far more cerebral than startling. For Jordan Hoffman, writing at the A.V. Club, “the biggest shock [in Crimes] is that when internal organs aren’t slithering around in close up, the rest of the movie is just a concrete wall of very slow dialogue.”
Indeed, Ann Hornaday echoes at The Washington Post, the film “takes an intriguing premise only to muddle it up within a tedious story, equally tiresome characters, the director’s fetishistic go-tos, self-conscious opacity and blunt obviousness.”
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