Crimes of the Future

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

Writer & Director - David Cronenberg

2022 ~ Canada

Stars - Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart

Judging a film on what has gone before surely only goes so far. Mark Kermode’s review has been reduced to mostly one just namechecking the obvious nods to Cronenberg’s previous works as if this mitigates ‘Crimes of the Future’s worth. But Cronenberg is totally self-aware and deliberate – oh, ‘Videodrome’ TVs; ‘Dead Ringers’ wish for a beauty pageant for internal organs, ‘Shivers’ autopsy; a chair that could be furniture from ‘Naked Lunch’, etc. – which surely means he is slotting this into the tapestry of what he originated. The ae debate. ‘Crimes of the Future’ even takes its title from Cronenberg’s earliest works; the conspiracies and underground rebel groups are the kind from ‘Scanners’ and the dirty dilapidated rooms and backstreets remind me of Interzone (‘Naked Lunch’). Saying “This is just like his earlier stuff and that was better” doesn’t really say much about how it therefore relates to Cronenberg’s oeuvre, or its independent merits, o. Easter egg spotting doesn’t illuminate more than homages, influences and derivatives. But when the artist is drawing from his own extensive back catalogue, and when that artist is Cronenberg, there’s more at play.  

If this namechecking is meant as a criticism of thematic and artistic repetition, and therefore inferiority and stunted artistic growth, I would argue that this too doesn’t quite enlighten: there’s Tarantino’s or Scorsese’s recourse to ensemble criminals, or Schrader’s lost male existential angst, or Bergman’s existential concerns, Ozu’s family dramas, or, etc. And if anyone has established his themes and held them close throughout a long career, it's Cronenberg. He is even credited with forming a subgenre known as body-horror.

Rather, that Cronenberg can still capture the spirit of the muse that set him off appeared a little remarkable to me, rather than reductive, considering how singular it is and with the evolution of his extensive filmography. ‘Crimes of the Future’ is just as talky, uneven, occasionally disturbing, visceral and not-quite-gelling, a little confusing, a little random, viscerally inventive and a little prescient as his earliest body-horrors. As soon as Mortenson said, “My bed needs new software,” I chuckled, because knew I was in Cronenberg’s world and therefore in safe hands for a somewhat messy palette of provocative ideas firing off here and there. But what we also have is the latter-day Cronenberg inclusion of pretty/slicker visuals and elegance smoothing down the scruffiness of exploitation. The opening shot of a boy framed with a sunken ship is a gorgeous holiday picture subversion. Then he eats a waste bin and the oddness is introduced to the narrative. That’s the surprise that sets questions; and then the mother murders the boy and that’s a shock. Then cut to a quite beautiful medium shot of an odd levitating bed-mechanism in which Mortensen is moaning in his sleep.

The husk of a ship also appears later as the backdrop to Saul Tester’s (Mortenson) clandestine meetings. Throughout there are clues to a ruined world that is hinted at but never explicated. The clues scattered around are what provide fun and discussion when trying to figure it out afterwards. The capsized society signified by the boat is at odds with the expense and luxury of the artists we follow, who indulge in body self-mutilation in a manifestation of cultural confusion of finding the human race has turned immune to pain. But there’s an obvious divide between the poverty and disenfranchisement alluded to by those grubby backstreets and the hipsters that are our protagonists.

It is the questions left hanging, the pictures you can extrapolate and paint that makes this more that sum of its parts. It’s focused on one subculture’s response to the next phase of human evolution, but its proposition that Those In Power will always try and thwart this and any arguable progression that strikes true. It also has a prod at Look At me Art culture without recourse to mobile phones. 

But then there’s some nudity which, for the first time in a Cronenberg film, felt to me to be gratuitous. And although some enjoy Kristen Stewart’s performance seemingly for camp value, its wink and neediness seem out-of-tune with the careful calibrations of tone elsewhere. But Cronenberg was always a little messy and uneven at times. Raw is the word, even if the ideas are serious and dense. 

That is, to say, even if you judge this lesser Cronenberg, ‘Crimes of the Future’ is still fully spiced with a headful of ideas that interrogate culture, evolution and technology and reaches existential and exploitational ruminations characteristic of this singular director. What this film tells is that Cronenberg is no less an interrogator of these themes than he ever was at this later point in his career.