Crimes of the Future a punishment for some
★★★★
There’s not many eponymous adjectives we use in writing about films. There’s Hitchcockian and Spielbergian, I guess. Kubrickian and Lynchian have snuck into these pages once or twice.
And I nearly wrote ‘‘Riefenstahlesque’’ a few months back but we don’t pay our editors enough to put them through that ordeal, so I settled for ‘‘like Leni Riefenstahl’’ instead.
I’ve used Cronenbergian a few times over the years. And no-one ever complains they don’t understand what that means.
David Cronenberg has been making feature films since 1969. His second ever was called Crimes of the Future.
But, with Cronenberg being the bloody-minded contrarian that he is, it is unrelated to this current film in any way. It just happens to have the same title.
Cronenberg made his bones in ‘‘body horror’’. Across the decades he has sliced, diced and pierced his cast at a rate that John Carpenter and Wes Craven would approve of.
But Cronenberg is not a director of slashers. His characters are more likely to be undergoing surgical procedures at the hands of people they know, than running into demented killers in dark alleyways.
From the 1980s onwards, Cronenberg flirted with the mainstream.
His remake of The Fly, Dead Ringers and his adaptation of William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch all found a wide audience and acclaim.
And with the 2005 AHistory Of Violence and 2007 Eastern Promises – both starring Viggo Mortensen as men who could send most cinema action heroes running home to their mamas – Cronenberg showed that he could make a box office-pleasing thriller that even the critics adored.
But this present Crimes of the Future finds Cronenberg back in the world of dissections and mutilation-as-metaphor.
In the future – maybe a few decades – Mortensen and Lea Seydoux (No Time To Die) are performance artists.
She ‘‘performs’’ surgeries on him, for an audience we assume have paid to watch. Mortensen’s Saul – like many people of the age – is plagued by extraneous and unneeded organs that grow in his torso.
And the removal of these organs by Seydoux’s Caprice provides a precarious and vicarious living for the couple.
This is a desensitised society. Few people can even experience pain any more. Saul, ironically enough, is one who can.
But he seems to experience pain more as a lower level of ecstasy, as though he were a saint being flagellated but not yet killed.
Into the narrative comes Kristen Stewart as an agent of The National Organ Registry, functioning in Cronenberg’s script almost as an old-fashioned detective from a 1950s noir, who will lead us into the more shadowy corners of the world that Saul and Caprice inhabit.
Crimes of the Future is many things and few of them are pleasant. It is a satire of theatre and performance art, a dialogue on bodily autonomy and a dark commentary on human vanity.
It is laugh-out-loud funny at times, but it is also a film in which the murder of a child and his subsequent dissection – for an audience – are cornerstones of the script. You won’t see many more deserved R18 stickers than the one on the poster for Crimes of the Future.
At the age of 80, the Cronenberg who earned that eponymous adjective is very much still with us.
Crimes of the Future is now screening in select cinemas nationwide.