CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022)

Studio:     Neon
Director:    David Cronenberg
Writer:     David Cronenberg
Producer:  Robert Lantos, Panos Papahadzis, Steve Solomos
Stars:     Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux, Scott Speedman, Kristen Stewart, Welket Bungue, Don McKellar, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos

Review Score:

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Summary:

In a near future where biotechnology has altered human evolution, a man with a unique ability to generate new organs becomes a key part of a plot to control genetic enhancements.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

In a near future where biotechnology has drastically changed the evolution of human physiology, Djuna Dotrice uses a pillow to suffocate her eight-year-old son Brecken because she is repulsed by the boy’s inherited ability to eat and digest plastic. Brecken’s distraught father Lang, who leads an underground movement of rebels who deliberately altered their bodies to be able to consume plastic, retrieves his son’s body while Djuna goes to prison.

Although pain and infectious diseases are largely eradicated, Saul Tenser still suffers from respiratory and digestive discomfort due to Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, which allows his body to generate new types of organs. Saul manages his condition by using biomechanical devices including an incubation bed as well as a breakfast chair that helps him eat. Saul also works as a performance artist with his partner Caprice, a former trauma surgeon who uses a modified Sark autopsy module to remove Saul’s unique organs in front of fascinated audiences.

Saul and Caprice meet with Mr. Wippet and Timlin at the National Organ Registry, a bureaucratic agency with exclusive access to cataloguing Saul’s organs. Wippet uses his office’s machinery to tattoo the latest organ developing inside Saul’s body.

Caprice subsequently removes the tattooed organ in front of a live audience as part of the couple’s artistic show. After the performance, Timlin expresses her arousal by the procedure and tells Saul, “Surgery is the new sex.”

Detective Cope, who works with the New Vice unit to monitor illegal evolution advancements, questions Wippet and Timlin about Saul’s unique organ portfolio. Cope wonders if bodily deformities like Saul’s can legitimately be considered works of artistic expression. In actuality, Saul secretly works with Cope as an undercover informant.

Klinek, a man who grows ears all over his body, performs his own show for a live audience. Backstage, Saul meets Klinek’s biomorphology coordinator Adrienne Berceau. After having a discussion about how Saul’s abilities relate to “inner beauty,” Adrienne gives Saul a business card for Dr. Nasatir and tells Saul she already booked him a consultation.

Lang Dotrice tracks down Saul and proposes that for his next show, Saul should do a live autopsy on Lang’s dead son Brecken. Saul tells Caprice about Lang’s proposal while he uses the Sark module to perform an arousing operation on her.

Saul meets with Cope. Saul passes along Dr. Nasatir’s business card and reports his talk about “inner beauty” with Adrienne Berceau. Saul also asks about Djuna Dotrice murdering her son and requests a meeting with her to find out why Lang wants an autopsy. Meanwhile, Caprice has her Sark module serviced by Router and Berst, two authorized technicians who work on the LifeFormWare technology that Saul and others popularly use.

Saul goes to see Dr. Nasatir. Nasatir reveals that he wants Saul to register for an exclusive inner beauty pageant where he hopes Saul can win Best Original Organ or even Best in Show. Nasatir performs an operation that allows access inside Saul’s torso. Caprice finds Saul’s new surgical wound arousing.

Saul meets with Djuna in prison. Saul learns Djuna saw her son as an abomination because Brecken biologically inherited his father Lang’s augmented ability to consume plastic.

Lang visits with Tarr, who runs their group’s operation that secretly manufactures bars of synthetic plastic for them to eat. Lang warns that they will have to move their operation because the live autopsy he arranged for Brecken will finally expose what they are doing to the public.

Caprice becomes inspired by performance artist Odile’s desire to be cut open. Caprice ends up getting her own forehead implants.

Saul meets with Wippet again and discovers he is in charge of registration for the inner beauty pageant. Saul also talks with Timlin, and he asks her if she has ever come across a system of neo-organs capable of digesting plastics. Timlin fawns over Saul like an idolized celebrity and the two of them briefly kiss until Saul apologizes for not being good at “old sex.”

Over the course of two separate meetings, Saul and Caprice discuss Brecken’s potential autopsy with Lang. Saul reveals what Djuna told him about Brecken’s digestive system. Lang admits that he and others suffered from the same eating disorder as Saul, so they created a network of revolutionaries who illegally altered their bodies to be able to eat plastic. Lang shows Saul the synthetic foods bars they manufacture from toxic waste. Lang explains that his group believes their bodies were telling them to synch with technology because humanity’s destiny is to consume the industrial waste it created.

Lang further explains that Brecken was the first person to be naturally born with a plastic-processing digestive system rather than one that had to be externally modified. Saul finds Lang’s revelation difficult to believe. Lang goes on to say that he hopes a live autopsy on Brecken will show the promise of a future where humanity is in harmony with technology.

Saul asks Cope if he should publicly perform Brecken’s autopsy. Cope indicates that the government wants to suppress the truth about evolutionary enhancements having become hereditary as he talks to Saul about infiltrating Lang’s network of plastic-eating “freaks.” Meanwhile, technicians Router and Berst participate in the conspiracy to hide the truth by programming Dr. Nasatir’s breakfast chair to kill him.

Saul and Caprice perform Brecken’s autopsy before a live audience. Everyone is shocked when they open Brecken to discover all of his organs are tattooed, implying his genetic alterations were artificially manufactured after all. After the show, Router and Berst clandestinely assassinate Lang.

Saul tells Cope he recognized that Brecken’s body was sabotaged. Cope admits that Timlin tattooed Brecken’s organs as part of a plot to keep the government in control of what the public believes about evolutionary enhancements.

When Saul again struggles to eat in his biomechanical chair, Caprice feeds him one of Lang’s plastic bars. Saul immediately calms as a revelatory expression crosses his face.

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Review:

David Cronenberg intimidates me. Or, more accurately, the idea of reviewing a David Cronenberg film intimidates me.

Growing up as an eager student of horror, Cronenberg was of course a major field in my curriculum. All of his hits from “Scanners” and “The Fly” to “The Dead Zone” and “Videodrome” appear on any syllabus related to the genre, and they were essential lessons whenever I went to the video store to pick up my homework for the weekend.

Looking back on it though, teenage me never fully understood the scope of Cronenberg’s work. I enjoyed his films because he showed me wild sights like psychics making heads explode and Jeff Goldblum mutating into a monster. Cronenberg’s repeated themes of humanity abusing technology to dangerously alter nature and political perversion of bureaucratic institutions were too high-minded for my underdeveloped worldview to comprehend. I likely thought I was just watching entertaining, regular midnight movie madness from another maestro of the macabre who made Stephen King adaptations and occasionally dabbled in dalliances like directing an episode of “Friday the 13th: The Series,” one of my favorite TV shows at the time.

I kept up with Cronenberg, although I still wasn’t picking up everything he was putting down. By the time “Crash” came out, I was in college. Being an arthouse film, “Crash” only played in one local theater, and it was on the other side of town, but it was a “prestige” place that served alcohol, which meant I could watch the movie while drinking wine and feel like a right proper film snob. I convinced my dad to go with me by billing it as a movie by one of my favorite weirdo filmmakers that was about people who get sexual gratification out of car crashes. I probably just wanted to pretend I was “in” on some kind of secret section of cinema, and wasn’t really paying attention beyond thinking of “Crash” as a bizarre B-movie.

I’m over twice as old now as I was then, and not necessarily significantly closer to finding every sociopolitical nuance in Cronenberg’s commentary. Slavish fans celebrate Cronenberg as the Jean-Paul Sartre of philosophical filmmaking, often worshipping him like a divine deity who deserves nothing less than a 20-minute standing ovation whenever he debuts a new aria. That’s why, as someone more or less resigned to a niche focus on DTV movies about Amityville and Ouija boards, it’s a daunting prospect to critique something by Cronenberg when I may not be adequately equipped with the tools to deliver a deep dive into the subtext and context he’s best known for.

It’s also because “Crimes of the Future” is not a movie that can be dissected within an hour or two immediately after end credits roll, not with any expectation of finding everything lurking inside its torso. As is typical of David Cronenberg’s modern filmography, the movie speaks its own language, conceptually as well as literally. Characters have unusual names with unlikely spellings like Klinek, Nasatir, Berst, and Wippet. Biomechanical technology adorns every set with contraptions that are Gigeresquely grotesque while being oddly analog in design. And of course, “Crimes of the Future” follows fiction that’s virtually impossible to summarize in a single logline.

“Crimes of the Future” takes place in, where else, an unspecified near future where bodily augmentation has drastically altered human evolution. Disease no longer exists. Neither does physical pain. There are exceptions, however, such as in the case of Viggo Mortensen’s Saul Tenser. Saul suffers from a rare syndrome that requires a semi-sentient bed to heal his body and a skeleton-like breakfast chair whose automated arms help feed him. The tradeoff is Saul has an unusual ability to grow new, as in never before discovered, organs inside his body. After they’re officially tattooed by the National Organ Registry, Saul’s partner Caprice then surgically removes these organs in front of fascinated audiences in a choreographed performance art show that’s like Cirque du Soleil if it catered to medical fetishes. As Kristen Stewart explains when her character becomes almost uncontrollably aroused by the artful procedure, “Surgery is the new sex,” effectively turning operations into a titillating public peepshow.

Meanwhile, Scott Speedman’s Lang Dotrice leads an underground movement of revolutionaries who’ve modified their stomachs to be able to digest synthetic plastic. Lang’s son Brecken genetically inherited this ability biologically, which would upend everything the government has led the public to believe about artificial evolution if Saul would help Lang expose this dangerous truth to the world. With an unsubtle statement, Cronenberg theorizes through Lang’s dialogue that it was only natural for human beings to synch their bodies with technology, and it’s our destiny to subsist off the industrial waste we’ve littered our world with. Even a former kid only interested in men morphing into insects can see the declarative warning Cronenberg means to make here.

More of Cronenberg’s thoughts on the complicated relationship between scientific advancement and unadulterated evolution exist for those with the inclination to dig further into this particular chapter in his Big Book of Body Horror Theology. Not everyone will willingly take that trip, some because they don’t have an inherent desire to see beyond the tangible narrative, and some because pacing and staging won’t compel them to do so.

Swooning in hazy surrealness, “Crimes of the Future” maintains a patiently slow stride. Scenes are sequenced as a series of people visiting with one another over and over again. Saul meets with a detective. Saul meets with a doctor. Saul meets with Lang. Saul meets with Lang’s ex-wife. The movie features more knocks on doors than a canvasser puts into an average neighborhood prior to a local election. Choose not to tune into the movie’s messaging and its other purpose as a cabinet of Cronenbergian curiosities may not energize your enthusiasm.

Maybe I should be intimidated by your potential reaction to this light review rather than by the task of writing it. Will the Cronenberg cronies find my superficial analysis so trite that they complain I’m too dense to “get” his genius? Will someone only looking for something avant-garde to watch find enough info to indicate whether or not this brand of bizarre will occupy their interest? Or am I worried for nothing about reading too much into a mere musing where A-list actors mill about B-movie production design as an experimental lark?

Review Score: 65

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