The Doctor’s Diagnosis: C
Crimes of the Future was my most anticipated film of the year because it features the return of director David Cronenberg, best known for the excellent and horrific 80s version of The Fly. Cronenberg hasn’t made a movie in eight years and I had assumed that he was retired. Furthermore, this film marks a return to Cronenberg’s roots: a blend of horror and science fiction and, more specifically, body horror that he had largely abandoned since the 90s. Unfortunately, while Crimes of the Future is a return to the themes and imagery of the director’s early work, it is also a meandering film that struggles to find a story to suit its themes, resulting in a movie that is more often boring than provocative.
We open with a mother gleefully smothering her little boy to death after the kid eats a plastic garbage can and then the movie gets weird. Crimes of the Future takes place in a future with advanced biotechnology, though all other forms of technology have seemingly regressed and every location looks like a broken-down office building from the 80s. This aesthetic is never explained. Anyway, humans have also evolved to the point that physical pain no longer exists. Without physical pain, extreme body modification has become common, mutilation has become entertainment and unnecessary surgery is now erotic performance art. Our main characters, Saul (played by Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (played by Léa Seydoux), are among the most popular such performance artists.
Crimes of the Future clearly wants to make a commentary on fetishistic sex, and particularly BDSM, but I’m not quite sure what the comment is. The dynamic between Caprice and Saul presents a futuristic version of a dom/sub relationship that is devoid of traditional concepts of human sensation, as she operates the surgical machinery that digs into his vital organs as an audience watches in quiet awe. These scenes play out like the most depressing BDSM club in the world, where people seem to have a mild intellectual interest with only slight hints of sexuality. With the exception of a couple of fleeting moments, the relationship between Saul and Caprice generally seems passionless, and even disinterested, regarding their performances only as pretentious, transformative acts of art. This lack of raw emotion could be seen as a logical choice in the thematic framework of the film, but the characters also repeatedly tell us that “surgery is the new sex,” implying that these acts and relationships shouldn’t be as coldly intellectual and unenjoyable as they are presented to be. The film’s message is, therefore, vague as it seems to be presenting a world without sex and a world of extreme fetishes at the same time, rendering it unable to present any interesting insights about either scenario. The lack of focus is particularly disappointing coming from Cronenberg, whose work has often tackled such ideas with far greater success.
The main plot eventually revolves around a government conspiracy and the boy that’s murdered in the opening scene. The boy’s father was part of group that taught themselves to eat bars of plastic with the rationale that mankind must logically evolve to survive off of industrial byproducts in order to avoid extinction. The boy was the first born with the ability to live off of plastic and, therefore, represented the first major step in this evolution. The government (and apparently the boy’s mother) don’t take kindly to this idea and try to conceal the apparent evolution.
The environmental message of this plot element is obvious (in fact, too obvious) compared with whatever the hell the movie is trying to say with the relationship between Saul and Caprice. However, the eventual combination of the two plots only further confuses things. The boy’s father (and, yes, I clearly don’t remember these characters’ names) brings the kid’s dead body to Saul and Caprice, asking them to perform an autopsy as part of their live show and reveal his evolved anatomy to the world. Aside from just how generally macabre that is, it is perplexing (and, frankly, fucked up) to include the autopsy of a child as part of what has been presented as a fetish show. Perhaps this is why the film downplays the sexuality of the Saul/Caprice relationship, as it would be beyond the scope of bad taste to include a child autopsy in such a context, but it only further blurs the film’s intentions. Maybe make a film about fetishized surgery or a film about industrial-based human evolution, but don’t do both at the same time.
As disgusting as this movie may sound, it is often more boring than the plot summary would suggest. The drab set design is part of the problem, but the largely subdued performances don’t help matters. Both Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux often seem only mildly interested in the plot and in each other. Considering the talent of both actors, I have to assumer that this was a conscious artistic choice that I don’t understand. They are honestly the most boring couple that I’ve ever seen that are into fetish surgery and, boy, if I had a dime for every time that I’ve said that. The only person that seems to be having a good time, and to be conveying the bizarre sexuality that the material is going for, is Kristen Stewart in a supporting role. She steals every scene that she is in and the only person that I buy is into the idea of being cut open for an audience. Everybody else seems bored, but this chick is into this shit.
Crimes of the Future is a colossal disappointment. It isn’t an awful film, and I’m sure it will spark a lot of conversation in the coming years, but it is certainly not representative of Cronenberg’s work. I have heard many stories of people walking out on the film because of how disturbing it is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if half of those people were just bored. There is a lot that can go wrong with sexualizing unnecessary surgery, but I never thought that it could be this dull.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimes_of_the_Future_(2022_film)#/media/File:Crimes_of_the_Future_(2022_film).jpg
