"Crimes of the Future" review — David Cronenberg returns to body horror with peculiar sci-fi flick

“Body is reality.”

Canada has a reputation, whether justified or not, for being a polite place. There’s the stereotype of the Canadian “sorry” and of a general attitude of inoffensiveness. We’re the type of people to elect someone like Justin Trudeau as our Prime Minister. The idea is that Canadians tend to be polite, apologetic, and non-confrontational. And so it remains endlessly fascinating to me that Canada’s most famous film director has a five-decade career defined by unsettling gore, disturbing themes, and a willingness to push the human body to its most extreme. Perhaps it reveals something about the dark emotions repressed deep within the Canadian national consciousness, or perhaps David Cronenberg simply remains both a supreme oddity and a national treasure. With his new film Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg once again regains his status as one of the most disturbing yet thoughtful filmmakers working today.

After an eight-year break from filmmaking following his 2014 feature Maps to the Stars, director David Cronenberg returns with Crimes of the Future, a film which shares a title but no relationship with one of his earliest features, which premiered at Cannes last month to both walkouts and a six-minute standing ovation. The film is a return to form for Cronenberg and gets back to his sci-fi/body-horror roots — roots well documented in films like Videodrome (1983), Scanners (1981), eXistenZ (1999), and The Fly (1986). Unlike those films, however, Crimes of the Future is the work of a much more mature filmmaker, an elder statesman of the genre who grapples with his legacy through this film. With some gnarly, disgusting design, interesting themes, stunning gross-out scenes, and three very solid performances, I cannot help but be quite compelled by Crimes of the Future. 

Despite its title, the film begins with a crime well-documented: murder. With very little context, a child is killed by his mother. She hates him. She calls him a “creature” and refuses to acknowledge neither her parental role nor her son’s humanity setting the stage for the struggle between the old and the new that the film builds its identity on.

Kristen Stewart and Léa Seydoux in Crimes of the Future. Image: MK2 Mile-End

Set in an undefined future where pain is non-existent, the film follows Saul Tenser, brilliantly played by Viggo Mortensen in his fourth collaboration with Cronenberg, a performance artist who, along with his partner Caprise (Léa Seydoux), grows and removes new organs as a means of artistic expression. Saul suffers from something called “accelerated evolution syndrome” which makes his body the front line of human evolution. He’s an artist whose work is fuelled by anger. “I don’t like what’s happening with the body,” he says. Not being able to feel pain is pushing the body into some dangerous territory. As one of the film’s characters says, “pain is a warning system.” Without that warning system, humanity might just push itself too far. In Saul’s view, the future is losing what it means to be human.

Cronenberg’s future isn’t a very nice place to be. It’s deeply alienating to those living in the past and seems very sanitized. The film is set in abandoned office buildings, grungy basements, and narrow alleyways. The interior walls are all cracked drywall and plain concrete. The stone buildings are adorned with flaking paint and fresh graffiti. Technology exists in a strange state between advancement and regression. It’s a run-down future perhaps reeling from some great tragedy or disaster. What has happened, however, is never stated. All the while, art abounds and no one feels any pain. Humanity, like the world we inhabit, is wildly different in the future. Pain has been nearly eradicated. People spend their free time aimlessly cutting into themselves and augmenting their bodies for the fun of it. There’s no longer any disease. As Caprice cuts into Saul, we never see the sanitization or the clean-up, just the result of the surgery. “Surgery is the new sex,” says Timlin, an agent of the National Organ Registry played by a soft-spoken, creepy Kristen Stewart. Tenser seems to resonate with this sentiment. 

The irony of watching Crimes of the Future from the present is that these people have already changed, whether they like it or not. This future deviates from what we would perceive to be the human experience. As Saul talks about people losing their humanity, we recognize that Saul isn’t even all that human. The characters act and behave in strange, sometimes off-putting ways as the very psychology of human behaviour have changed. The film is about characters protesting against change in a world that already feels inhuman. As a result, the film often feels uninviting, and even inhospitable, to its viewers, even to a greater extent than the rest of Cronenberg’s already uninviting filmography.

Kristen Stewart and Viggo Mortensen in Crimes of the Future. Image: MK2 Mile End.

While Crimes of the Future may have been marketed on its body horror and gross-out content, the film itself is much more thoughtful than the trailers may have given it credit. The classic body horror is here and it is deliciously uncomfortable. The effects and design work is brutalistic and deeply disturbing. However, the gore at many times takes a back seat to the feeling of dread that Cronenberg laces over the entire film. Not only that, but the film wears its themes on its sleeve, proving to be more thoughtful than might be assumed at first glance. Thematically, Cronenberg covers a lot of familiar territory with Crimes of the Future. The film enters into his long-standing obsession with the body and its connection to art but is now taken to a higher extreme. Videodrome’s iconic line “long live the new flesh” seems to be especially pertinent here as characters like insurrectionist Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman) push the limits of what the body can do. There is the inclusion of a very literal “inner beauty pageant,” a fun callback to a line spoken by Jeremy Iron’s Elliot Mantle in Dead Ringers. 

Of course, the central story of an aging artist slowly losing touch with his art seems all the more potent given Cronenberg’s own age. In the film, Saul is getting old. While deeply respected by his peers, the boundary-pushing artist seems to be losing touch with his art all the while audiences are drawn to performances that emphasize spectacle over substance. In real life, David Cronenberg is getting old. Now seventy-nine, his latest strange horror-meets-philosophy hybrid competes in theatres against Jurassic World Dominion. It’s hard to not see the parallels.

Crimes of the Future is a strange, frightening film. The film at times is frustratingly vague, lacking the visual depth and worldbuilding that many viewers may desire. The film, pairing the cerebral with the visceral, is a challenge at times. While basking in the light of his other films, Crimes of the Future is a far cry from the horror movies Cronenberg use to make. Don’t go into this film expecting to see Cronenberg as he’s been understood. Instead, be prepared to witness something deeply personal that shows the filmmaker coming to terms with his own art while tearing Viggo Mortensen’s body up in the process. Long live the old flesh.

Crimes of the Future is now playing in theatres.

Crimes of the Future information
Written and directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Scott Speedman, and Kristen Stewart
Released 3 June 2022
107 minutes