Review:
"Crimes of the Future"
Release Date: June 3, 2022
Rating: R Running Time: 107 minutes So much for the great future predicted for plastics in The Graduate. Crimes of the Future, writer/director David Cronenberg’s first exercise in body horror since 1999’s equally methodically paced eXistenZ, opens with a young boy chewing his way through a plastic bathroom trash can. Cronenberg does not offer an immediate explanation for the child’s unusual dietary habits but it is tied into the biological phenomenon the uncompromising director of Videodrome andThe Fly explores with the same sharp and inquiring mind he has displayed throughout his long and distinctive career. Cronenberg transports us to a near-future free of pain and infectious disease. Thousands inexplicably start to grow nonfunctioning internal or external organs. The public’s fascination with “accelerated evolution syndrome” results in Viggo Mortensen’s Saul Tenser and Léa Seydoux’s Caprice redefining the surgical removal of these organs as performance art. Demand is high to watch Caprice skillfully cut out Saul’s nonfunctioning organs. But Saul begins to experience extreme discomfort eating and breathing at the same time the couple is approached by Scott Speedman’s grieving father Lang Dotrice to perform an autopsy of his dead son in front of a paying audience. Cronenberg sets Saul on a mildly intriguing and occasionally haunting journey of profound discovery that forces the oft-confused performance artist to cross paths with overeager surgeons, obsessive government bureaucrats, zealot cult members, and cops charged with upholding laws restricting human evolution. This all plays out in a drably lit, nondescript small nameless city that lacks a sense of time and place, which works against Cronenberg’s efforts to create a dystopian atmosphere of dread built on both the fear and the allure of the unknown. But Cronenberg’s primary focus is—as it has been for 50 years—pushing the human body beyond its limits. The body as art is not a new concept, and Crimes of the Future serves as a continuation of Cronenberg’s search for beauty in his grotesque reshaping of the human form. He cannily taps into current ecological concerns to present a human body that is slowly but efficiently and effectively adjusting to an environment permanently damaged by neglect, industrial pollution, and technological advances. His exploration of the new flesh in Crimes of the Future manifests itself through performance art sequences staged with surgical precision but bursting with intellectual curiosity. Of course, non-Cronenberg fans will likely find these moments somewhat stomach churning despite the clinical approach taken by the director. His goal is to investigate, not to horrify. At least not he starts to equate the cutting and manipulating of flesh with the pursuit of pleasure. “Surgery is the new sex,” declares Kristen Stewart, bursting with a salacious energy as a government official whose interest in both Saul and human evolution goes above and beyond her duties. Then there are the biomechanical devices employed for medical and non-medical purposes. These marvelous creations possess the same realistic flesh-and-bone quality as the VR devices at the center of in eXistenZ which make them a natural extension of their user. But their presence in this evocative cautionary tale is a direct result of strange and unexplainable changes that has set in motion a chain of events that can only be delayed, not stopped. For Cronenberg, to evolve is to survive. Even if it means finding an appetite for plastic. Robert Sims Aired: June 7, 2022. Web site: https://www.crimesofthefuture.film/ |
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