Crimes of the Future (2022)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Its opening sequence reads like some of the auteur's best work. A little boy in a nasty, dirty bathroom, curls up beneath the sink and begins eating. But this is not a vampire from The Brood or an offspring of The Fly; he eats a trash can. Not its contents. Literally the can itself. It's weird, certainly, but not quite horrifying. That adjective comes into play a moment later, when the boy's sad and disgusted mother enters and kills the boy. A brutal way to start a film, and all the more intriguing because there is no exposition, no rationale, no history. And, noteworthy, we never revisit the scene in the film.

Cronenberg is of course the master of body horror (or "the body beautiful" as he calls it), and Crimes of the Future is very much a return to form after two decades of drama and history and thriller films (almost all of which are also excellent). From his twisted mind, we're introduced very quickly and without any panache to a world in the vaguely distant future that feels grim, grimy, and altogether nasty. Think a less urban Blade Runner aesthetic. Humanity has apparently begun to mutate in this polluted waste of a world so that some humans continuously grow new organs, and most humans no longer experience pain. As a result, of course, new occupations have arisen. In what seems to be his fantasy of the middle of the end of humankind (it's not the beginning because of the world-weary nature of the proceedings and the characters, and it's not the end because humans are apparently generally handling the world fairly well), there has sprung up quite a market for human organs. Technicians have developed biological machines to help humans sleep and eat more organically (as if those weren't two of the most organic functions of humans anyway).

As different people have evolved differently, there seems to be an intense stigma specifically against humans who have evolved to the point of being able to eat plastics. Hence the opening scene. These considerations could make for a film with massive scope, somebody like Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich might make a global disaster movie; somebody like Steven Soderbergh or Ridley Scott might make an epic that is also intimate. Cronenberg, in his signature style, makes a distinctly political premise markedly antipolitical in execution, meaning that this movie that indirectly references the plastics that have polluted our world and that already exist within human bloodstreams and takes it to a logical conclusion: if saving the earth (and humanity) that was is less and less likely, as it is, perhaps we need to look forward into adapting our world to accept and cater to this plastics behemoth we've created.

It's frighteningly accessible to our pandemic world, too; learning to live with the constant threat of annihilation and how to not only survive but use that threat to somehow better ourselves. Enter Caprice (Lea Seydoux) and Saul (Viggo Mortensen), an ex-surgeon and performance artist respectively, who kind of hate what they do but fill a particular need and niche for themselves and their audience. Saul continuously grows new organs (and yes, the idea of increased and unwieldy cancer problems as a result of pollution and plastics is present), and for a profit, they perform surgeries in front of a crowd to remove those organs. It pushes Saul's body to horrific limits, opening the body to new possibilities as the film tells us; since pain isn't really a concern anymore, the body can be molded in much more violent ways than we see today with body modifications and performance/body art.

Where the movie makes its most intriguing (and, for me, horrific) turn is that these surgeries are notably erotic. Calmly wicked, subversive and raw, the new openings in Saul's body provide ample locations for penetration; several scenes in which Caprice slides her fingers or hand inside feel uncomfortably sexual. Perhaps it's this reality -- all captured with a sensual eye by the camera -- that entices Timlin (Kristen Stewart) to fall in love with the artistic duo. She's a bureaucrat gopher in the National Organ Registry, investigating and keeping tabs on new organ growths, which naturally brings her into a potentially compromising situation with Saul. On the other hand, the plastic folk are almost anti-sensual, as plastic (and toxic) in their interactions as in their diet, led by a mysterious and inscrutable Scott Speedman (I don't recall his character's name) who is determined to prove the government's stance on human evolution is wrong.

There is a lot of heady material here, and many lenses can be applied to the film to tease out its many ideas on everything from evolution to sex, from environment to government, from social corruption to economic failure. And yet the film places equal -- if not greater -- emphasis on the subtle, mostly nonverbal, human experience of all these things, as if to say, "this is our reality now, if exaggerated, so what do we really feel about it?" Alarming, calming, horrific and beautiful, this is Cronenberg at his typical best, and while it's confusing and cerebral stuff, it's also a fascinating and fun time at the cinema.