Written and Directed by David Cronenberg
Cinematography by Douglas Koch
Production Design by Carol Spier
Music by Howard Shore
Edited by Christopher Donaldson
Produced by Robert Lantos
Starring
Viggo Mortensen as Saul Tenser
Lea Seydoux as Caprice
Scott Speedman as Lang Dotrice
Lihi Kornowski as Djuna Dotrice
Don McKellar as Wippet
Kristen Stewart as Timlin
Nadia Litz as Router
Tanaya Beatty as Berst
Welket Bungue as Detective Cope
Yorgos Pirpassopoulos as Dr. Nasatir
. . .
"SAVE THE TUMORS!"
-bumper sticker slogan attributed to the American stand-up philosopher George Carlin in the late twentieth century or thereabouts.
"BODY
IS
REALITY"
-slogan appearing on a tube tv screen in the film Crimes of the Future (2022)
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
A body changes. A slogan appears on a screen-"BODY IS REALITY." So, reality changes. We are not what we once were. Gestation, birth, growth, exercise, diet, thoughts, beliefs, politics, art, sex, doubt, drugs, tattoos, piercings, aging, surgeries, modifications, medications, infections, sickness, death. Changes we choose, changes we seek, changes by chance, changes imposed by religion, changes imposed by the state. There's who you are, who you want to be, and what others want you to be. A lot of times, instead of the word want the word need gets used, but maybe that's stating the obvious.
In the movie Crimes of the Future, the human species has stopped feeling pain, and it has stopped getting infections . . . so, like, where's the orgy at?
Whoops. I guess I just laid my cards on the table. Sorry 'bout that.
Clears throat.
In the movie Crimes of the Future, the human species has stopped feeling pain, and it has stopped getting infections. Therefore, naturally, cutting becomes a recreational/sexual activity, and surgeons become performance artists. Instead of going to some boring museum to look at LCDs of some atrocious NFT monkeys, you crowd into what used to be a BDSM fuck dungeon in a post-industrial sector, and watch people get sliced open by precision robotic surgery machines, and then laser-cauterized shut just for the hell of it. I suppose the orgy is to be inferred. Hey, this is still a mainstream narrative movie. You can literally expose someone's guts as part of your content, but heaven help you if you have people fuck in any combination. It ain't boring, that's for sure.
We have various couples:
Saul Tensor and Caprice: Saul has a rare medical condition wherein he constantly grows novel organs that have to be cut out of his abdomen before they crowd out his essential viscera. Caprice is a former trauma surgeon. Together, they are the premiere power couple of the surgical performance art scene. Saul grows it, Caprice uses robotic scalpel armatures to slice it. The harvested novel organs are catalogued and stylishly illustrated into art objects.
Lang and Djuna Dotrice: These two had a son that was a mutant who lived by eating plastic. Mom Djuna was disgusted by this and so murdered her offspring to express her disaproval of such an abomination. Dad Lang is convinced his son was the next stage of human evolution, and so he establishes a radical evolutionary front movement to advocate on behalf of this new mode of being. So, the question is: was their son an aberration to be shit-canned or the embodiment of the human future?
Wippet and Timlin: These are a pair of colleagues, working on behalf of an evolutionary enforcement agency. They're supposed to be policing radical evolutionaries, but each of them seem to be drawn to the radical surgeries put on by Saul and Caprice, and, possibly, to the radical transformations that Lang is advocating. They're kinda like establishment squares wrestling with their inner freaks.
Router and Berst: Colleagues, but also a couple. They're technicians who service the biomechanical surgical beds that make the avant garde surgery scene possible. They represent the interests of what passes for Big Tech in this peculiar world.
Detective Cope and Dr. Nasatir: Not actually a couple, but these two each represent the ideological hardcore. Cope's a lawman looking to gather intel on the evolutionary outlaws. Nasatir's lending his medical expertise to the surgical artists and the mutant faction promoted by Lang. They're enemies, but they don't quite know it.
Crimes of the Future has a lot going on, much of it conveyed through layered, witty dialogue, and cleverly realized special effects setpieces embedded within moody, subterranean production design. The surgery beds have a gristly organic look evoking technology as an extension of human bodies and human desires.
Accelerated evolution brings about changes in technology, values, identity, sexuality, law, and economics. Some resist the future, others embrace it, still others react with violence.
I find the characters of Wippet and Timlin especially amusing. They're supposed to be government regulators but they're woefully underfunded and stuck using antiquated dead tree methods of record keeping.
Saul and Caprice have a couple of memorably perverse scenes of what I suppose could be described as, um, Surgical Sexuality? I said that this is a future wherein people have stopped feeling pain, but there's also the implication that humans have rapidly evolved new sources of pleasure.
Of course, Crimes of the Future, like many works of science fiction, can be interpreted both literally and metaphorically. We have here themes of sacrificing oneself for one's art; dealing with change; coping with sickness; asserting identity; art criticism; sexuality-it borders on the didactic, but I didn't mind this. Here's a movie with ideas, goddamnit, not a bunch of computer generated wrastling matches. It's funny, it's disturbing, its reach exceeds its grasp, it did not waste my time.
This is a David Cronenberg movie. He's the guy who made movies like Scanners, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Shivers, Rabid, Crash, Naked Lunch, eXistenZ, The Brood, The Dead Zone, Cosmopolis, Eastern Promises, and Videodrome. These are all movies dealing with questions of the body, of technology, of radical transformations-all within the context of a world driven by greed and the desires of established factions to impose controls upon outlaws, freaks, and rebels. Crimes of the Future is a worthy addition to this ever-mutating body of work. Internet tells me that Cronenberg is almost eighty years old, which makes me think that experience must count for something in this world.
I look forward to the next one.
