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Crimes of
the Future (2022)
 
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Directed
by:
David
Cronenberg |
COUNTRY
Canada/France/United Kingdom/Greece |
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GENRE
Drama/Sci-Fi/Horror |
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NORWEGIAN TITLE
Crimes of the Future |
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RUNNING
TIME
107 minutes |
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Produced
by:
Panos Papahadzis
Steve Solomos
Robert Lantos |
Written by:
David Cronenberg |
Review
The past meets the future in archetypal
Cronenbergian fashion as the Canadian auteur makes his career-long
obsession with mutilations and body horror into an art form –
explicitly. In a future, desolate world where human evolution
has accelerated with new organs having started to form in a chosen few, Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux
play a couple who have made these irregularities – and the surgical
removal of them – into a
lifestyle and a performance art. The cutting into and extraction of
these new organs has replaced traditional sex as their
form of intimacy. And their shows are attracting an array of both official and shady characters.
Crimes of the Future in many
ways encapsulates everything Cronenberg's filmmaking career has been
about – at least the part of his filmography he has also written
himself. It's like he has put all of his fascinations into one big
bucket and stirred it together with some newfound but in
essence quite outdated musings about the future of science and
humanity. The world he creates here is non-national, offline and
mechanical, as if the 21st century never happened. As such,
Crimes of the Future is a fairly direct thematic continuation of
eXistenZ,
which it has a lot more in common with than any of the movies
Cronenberg made in between these two. But whereas the 1999
film felt in touch with the current state of affairs, Crimes of
the Future feels oddly disconnected. It is spatially and
thematically restricting. And although Cronenberg wraps it all up
with skill and a sense of elegance and integrity, the film cannot
escape the
inherent air of artificiality which runs through it. Viggo Mortensen
is fine and creative as the ailing host of most of the new organs
depicted.
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