Crimes of the Future

Cronenberg acknowledged at the Cannes Film Festival press conference that the movie “addresses, though not overtly political way, the question of who owns whose ...

“(It would) solve the problem of famine,” he said. “It’s a constant in history: There’s some sort of government that wants to control its population and means once again, body is reality.” “The movie is not overtly political. Wade, so it is strange times” said Cronenberg about the right leaning political attitudes stateside. But to me, all art is political or innately political. All of this in a governing society that’s not too fond of it.

With Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg 'returns pleasingly to the obsessions of his earlier films, without reaching the heights of many of them', ...

The script leaves every plot strand thread hanging, as if Cronenberg thought he was making the pilot episode of a TV mini-series – and with this cast, and this premise, what a fantastic mini-series it might be. The film might have been livelier if it featured more people in more locations, but it raises the suspicion that Cronenberg simply didn't have the budget to realise his vision in the detail he wanted. Structured as a hardboiled detective thriller, Crimes of the Future has plenty of provocative concepts and images that will put a grin on your face (not least the dancer who has several ears on his face), but you may find yourself willing the plot to pick up momentum, and the ickiness to get a whole lot ickier. Of course, Cronenberg might have been aiming to conjure up a barren featureless dystopia, but it seems more likely that his team found some dingy, empty buildings in Greece, where the film was shot, and didn't have the money to fill them with furniture or decoration. Saul is a performance artist, and whenever a new organ develops inside him, his partner Caprice, played by Léa Seydoux, tattoos it while it is still in his torso, and then cuts it out of him in front of an appreciative audience. After a terrific prologue in which a boy munches contentedly on a plastic bin, Cronenberg introduces his main character, Saul Tenser, played by Viggo Mortensen. (All of the characters have "Saul Tenser"-ish names.) Saul’s weird ability to grow new internal organs may just prove that he is the next step in human evolution.

Audience members walked out of the Cannes Film Festival premiere of "Crimes of the Future" premiere on Monday. The film starring Kristen Stewart and Léa ...

“As the human species adapts to a synthetic environment, the body undergoes new transformations and mutations. I mean, I’m sure that we will have walkouts within the first five minutes of the movie. Stewart plays Timlin, an investigator looking into Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, the disease that allows Mortensen and Seydoux to carry out their performance.

Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen and director David Cronenberg promoted the horror film "Crimes of the Future" at the Cannes Film Festival.

He's given so much in every film he's ever made." "People associate David with body horror, and sort of a critical eye on the world that we live in. The 32-year-old actress attended the premiere of her film Crimes of the Future at the Palais des Festivals.

"Disturbingly sexy": Kristen Stewart and Viggo Mortensen's sex-horror Crimes of the Future is dividing audiences ... All hail David Cronenberg, purveyor of ...

Maybe it's a symptom of our collectively heightened tolerance for the gory and gross apropos of it hitting the mainstream (see: Game of Thrones), but Crimes of the Future is pretty subdued: there's little of the gross-out, bile-a-minute flavour of The Fly, nor the mind-blowing splatter of Scanners. If it shares any connecting tissue with Cronenberg's earlier filmography, it's via eXistenz, a fascinating but altogether tamer take on the director's old-school affinity for gore. Devious Dave got his walkouts, for sure: over the course of the movie, I counted three from my screen, two of which were the result of a scene in which Seydoux performs belly-lingus on Mortensen's (literally) unzipped abdomen. It's brutally tantalising on paper: set in a near-future dystopia where humankind has evolved past the need for pain, surgery has become the new sex, with performance artists carving themselves up inside bio-mechanical machines for perverse punters.

David Cronenberg's latest dystopian body horror drama centers on two surgical performance artists, played by Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux, who publicly ...

“I haven’t paid any attention to it in terms of altering my approach…The human condition is the subject of my filmmaking and all art. “Crimes of the Future” premiered at Cannes and will debut in theaters June 3. “Everyone loves to talk about how his movies are difficult to watch, and it’s fun to talk about people walking out of Cannes screenings,” Stewart said.

From deep in the bowels of David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future, you can hear the gurgle of profound ideas trying to find their way out: something about ...

Why resist the ludicrous pleasure of surrendering to his scalpel? The whole process is orchestrated by Caprice, who stands nearby in an evening dress, controlling the Sark’s movements via a glowing contraption that looks like a giant jeweled brooch. But in movies, a vibe can often carry you much further than ideas can, and Crimes of the Future—playing in competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival—has vibes to spare. From deep in the bowels of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, you can hear the gurgle of profound ideas trying to find their way out: something about the evolution and persistence of art, about the limits and the miracles of the human body, about how the government will always try to find ways to control our autonomy. Mortensen—now, in the wake of A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, one of Cronenberg’s signature actors—plays Saul Tenser, a man with the gift, or the curse, of growing extra organs that may or may not be of actual use to the human body. That’s OK. You don’t have to fully comprehend what Cronenberg’s going for here; for a while, at least, it’s enough just to go with it, and to revel in the fact that Cronenberg has returned to his familiar body-horror territory, greeting it like an old, if slimy, friend.

Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart star in the tale of a man whose party trick is having his organs cut out.

It's irresistible to see Cronenberg pivot to his classic mode to dissect weighty anxieties around mortality and perhaps even humankind's inevitable ...

On the whole, the effort to make heads or tails of the philosophies at the heart of “Crimes of the Future” is a laborious one amid a crowded canvas of players—among them are Scott Speedman’s enigmatic leader and a memorable Welket Bungué’s complicated detective—and open-ended ideas unsure of what to do with themselves. Perhaps all one can do is learn to live with and manipulate the unknown, like the rebellious performance artist Saul Tenser (a stony, mystical Viggo Mortensen) has done. It’s a bit heady to consider all this existential apprehension in our (allegedly) post-Covid world where the talk of yet another imminent variant and possible surge is proving to be psychologically crippling. If one feels no pain, if there is no cautionary system inherent to our bodies that warns us about our terminal limits, if unknown organs (or tumors) routinely sprout inside of our torsos, would we have a fighting chance to survive in the long run? With imagery purposely and all-too-obviously reminiscent of some of the visuals that existed in the master’s previous work, one can’t unsee a certain banality on occasion or shake a fan-service-y inkling. Based on this confidently uncanny opening alone, it makes sense to learn that it was towards the end of the 20th Century when Cronenberg conceived this story, in which our kind has mutated to grow new organs and evolved to make the notion of pain near-extinct.

David Cronenberg predicted audiences would walk out of Crimes of the Future within the first five minutes of its premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.

How does the rest of society respond to the new evolutions in the human body? The end result is a sci-fi premise sure to keep your head spinning for days but with an execution that sadly doesn’t do it justice. While on the topic of art, the set and prop design are truly eerie. While Saul chooses to dispose of his inner creations, others protest that he needs to embrace the changes in his body. They give the best idea of the type of world this is and the people who inhabit it. The rest of the movie plays out like a detective noir as Saul searches for answers about a life-changing new organ system.