Crimes Of The Future is hardly his best work, but it's a welcoming return to the familiar terrain of macabre sci-fi/horror after his diversion into psycho-thriller such as A Dangerous Method and Cosmopolis.īefore the premiere in Cannes, Cronenberg predicted, half-jokingly, that he expected mass walkouts within the first five minutes. At the same time, this is what he has done for decades - since Dead Ringers, The Fly, Scanners, Crash, Videodrome, ExistenZ - and no director can turn gross-out B-movie material into prestige arthouse fare with major stars like he does. Is this a sign of advanced evolution, when humans are able to consume the toxic, man-made industrial waste that is destroying the anthropocene world? In any case, Saul and Caprice are plotting their next show, a spectacular autopsy that will take everyone's breath away.Īll of this is pretty silly, and Cronenberg knows that (his actors do, too). Saul, it turns out, is a police informer and is dragged into a case in which a boy has been murdered by his own mother after she found out that he was capable of eating and digesting plastic. The plot will get many confused, though it doesn't really matter after a while. "Surgery," she declares, "is the new sex." And so we're deep in the Cronenbergian body-horror territory of guts, mutations, anatomical riots, eroticised flesh and carnal machines. Watching Caprice penetrating Saul's flesh with a scalpel, Timlin is transfixed and super-thrilled. Kristin Stewart plays Timlin, an eager bureaucrat who becomes a big fan of Saul. New organs must be registered with the authorities - theoretically, they may become important in future evolution. Saul is a celebrity in the scene: he has "cooked" many new organs inside his body, and his show is legendary for its surgical sophistication performed on a designer autopsy bed.
Our leading couple are Saul Tenser (the monkish Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Lea Seydoux), performance artists who act out live surgery to their audience in a setup resembling installation art ("the body is reality", reads a text on a monitor). These new organs have no known functions, and since humans have also become immune to pain, they sometimes undergo "desktop operation" - sidewalk surgery performed practically by anybody with a razor - to remove these growths. In the near future, humans have the ability to "grow" new organs inside their bodies. The premise is ingenious, anatomically speaking.
It's also a late Cronenberg - the Canadian is turning 80 - still bold and fearless and yet a little less sharp.
The next step full#
This is a vintage Cronenberg, full of icky displays of internal organs (this time, they are tattooed) and bizarre apparatus that look simultaneously like taxidermied monsters and medical equipment. It turns out to be what everyone thinks it's going to be, not more, not less. This time, what comes out of the belly is a menagerie of grotesque organs - organs with neither names nor functions, grown inside the body primed for involuntary evolution.ĭavid Cronenberg's Crimes Of The Future is one of the most anticipated films at the 75th Cannes Film Festival. Mechanical, electrified scalpels that split open the flesh - often, the belly - like a bulging purse being unzipped. The maestro is teasing us, with his favourite instrument: the scalpel.
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