Crimes takes the Future to a weird new place By: Randall King Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Friday, Jun. 3, 2022

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/06/2022 (1582 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Bless his twisted heart, David Cronenberg is back… with his “Future.”

Apart from the title, his new film has little to do with the notorious Canadian director’s 1970 film of the same name, aside from being set in a world beset by a plague of mutation. (Alas, there is no character here named “Adrian Tripod.”)

Crimes 2022 also distinguishes itself with star power attached, most notably Viggo Mortensen as Saul Tenser, a man whose penchant for creating strange new internal organs has made him a performance artist star, in collaboration with his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux), who shares Saul’s enthusiasm for sensual surgery.

Yes, you read that right. The movie shares a queasy fascination with medical erotica, recalling Cronenberg’s 1988 feature Dead Ringers, about mad gynecologist Beverly and his twin brother Elliot, both played by Jeremy Irons. “I’ve often thought there should be beauty contests for the insides of bodies,” Elliot says in the film, a sentiment that pretty much comes to fruition in this movie.

Saul’s story intersects with early scenes, in which a small boy is seen indulging in a habit of eating chunks of plastic. The boy’s mother disapproves and, shall we say, takes radical corrective measures.

Soon, the boy’s father (Scott Speedman) is meeting with Saul to discuss a project involving his son. Like Casablanca’s Rick Blaine transposed to the apocalypse, Saul is the nexus of a whole bunch of shady characters, including Wippet (Don McKellar), a too-enthusiastic bureaucrat in charge of new organ registration, his creepy assistant Timlin (Kristen Stewart), as well as a cop (Welket Bungué) of questionable devotion to the law. Also floating around menacingly are a pair of women (Nadia Litz and Tanaya Beatty) whose enthusiasm for recreational surgery runs downright sinister.

Cronenberg has been absent from filmmaking for the past nine years, and he returns with a disregard for convention very much intact.

Shot in Greece, the dystopia he creates is without the usual blasted futurescapes. The destruction of mankind is literally internalized, mostly hidden from view in the bodies of the afflicted. This is also a world without pain, where the hero Saul admits to one would-be seducer that he is not very good at traditional sex.

One must admire Viggo Mortensen’s lack of ego in taking a role that would frighten off most actors of his stature. Saul spends much time languishing in weird bio-pods and making old man noises. One could mistake his hooded costume for that of a ninja: In fact, it more closely resembles the outfit of a mad monk, denied of worldly pleasures and thus devoted to a life of ritualistic self-mutilation. It’s not a typical hero, but it’s certainly a Cronenberg hero.

And this is very much a Cronenberg movie in line with his “body horror” era (encompassing Videodrome, Rabid, The Brood and eXistenZ). It is occasionally shocking and squirm-inducing.

And yet it is not gratuitously horrifying. This is the kind of movie that could play at an art gallery, albeit one of the shady art galleries/performance spaces depicted in the film. (Never has the term “gallery opening” been quite so literal as it is here.)

While he once relished the gross-out, Cronenberg is a director who comes down on the side of exploring ideas and letting them take him to weird new places.

He does this sometimes at the expense of narrative coherence.

But his twisted heart is in the right place.

randall.king.arts@gmail.com

Twitter: @FreepKing