Crimes of the Future
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart
Rated MA15+
3/5
A work of brooding but insubstantial horror, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future has little to offer beyond macabre tone and visceral imagery.
In a future rife with pollution and mutation, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) is a performance artist who grows new organs in his body and removes them for live audiences.
Crimes of the Future has many compelling parts but lacks dramatic connective tissue.
The tone is dry but not sedate, which throws the subversive themes into sharper relief. Surgery and mutilation become mediums of art and sexuality in several squirmingly-unpleasant sequences, but it is also grimly amusing to watch the main characters casually discuss bureaucracy or artistic theory in the context of such a provocative, drastic warping of the human form. Mortensen is strangely endearing as Saul, playing a sickly man with a go-with-the-flow attitude and a sardonic sense of humour. The setting is grimy and intriguingly anachronistic, with biomechanical devices existing alongside CRT televisions and Super-8 cameras.
It is an ignorant cliché to say “nothing happens” in arthouse films, but this is regrettably accurate for Crimes of the Future. Saul is a passive protagonist, and the plot progresses with little urgency and too much spoken exposition. Above all else, Crimes of the Future is light on conflict: the plot-points of an activist group with unique mutations and the conspiracy to suppress their mutations feel slack, underdeveloped and almost incidental.
Cronenberg’s filmography is full of better body horror, including his outstanding 1986 The Fly remake, and I also heartily recommend Antiviral and Possessor (the latter being my 2020 film of the year), both directed by Cronenberg’s son Brandon.
Proof that atmosphere alone is not enough, Crimes of the Future is available to rent or buy on iTunes, and is also screening at Cinema Nova in Carlton.
