Director: David Cronenberg
107 minutes (18) 2022
Second Sight 4K Ultra HD
Rating: 9/10
Review by Christopher Geary
[Released 11th September]
With a title recycled from Cronenberg’s own short feature of 1970, this quite astonishing futuristic horror boldly re-mixes diverse concepts and themes from the Canadian auteur’s career highlights, and also delivers an endlessly fascinating celebration of intelligent science fictional tropes, explored at levels of creativity that no other genre director can ever match today. Although it’s an ambitiously original and mysterious drama, Crimes Of The Future nevertheless often plays like a supremely effective and valuable summation of signature 'Cronenberger' works, but without once feeling even slightly derivative.
Essentially, a romanticised story about accelerated “evolution and performance-art” COTF explores how everything is engagingly connected in an alternative universe. Not only the mind and the body with tech, but disaster politics and a grotesquely beautiful culture, so this might well be the most physically intimate, and wholly definitive post-cyberpunk movie. Shot on Greek locations, the decayed backdrop textures are powerful visually, atmospherically, and metaphorically, like unfinished business for this pioneer of bio-shockers. Following a squelchy series of apocalyptic mutations, pain is extinct. A plastic-eating ‘invented’ boy is murdered by his disturbed mother. Sickly mutant Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen, a regular Cronenberg collaborator on gangster thrillers) sleeps in a kind of organic cradle that fosters weird hormonal balances while he grows novelty glands. A secretive government's National Organ Registry tattoos provocative gene-mods, internally, like “tumours by Picasso”.
Former
trauma medic Caprice (Lea Seydoux) gets a bizarre autopsy module for blending
Grand Guignol theatre with sexy operations to control his rebel portfolio donations
for the Inner Beauty Pageant, concerned with something other than just subversive
‘designer cancers’, spawned by new dystopian flesh. ‘Creepy’ fan-girl Timlin (Kristen
Stewart) helps to focus this bio-tech satire from ‘mad doctor’ showmanship of ‘escapist
propaganda’. Suspicious neo-vice cop Cope challenges the legality of surgery
for the icky, tricky and trippy stage act. Here are driller-killers, organ-grinders,
and nightmare strangers, with black comedy, and riffs on superheroes not unlike
Matter-Eater Lad (DC).
Meanwhile, of course, subtexts abound, including viral violence, crashed climate, adaptation as primary human solution to any environmental crisis, and plenty of disturbing scenes to bridge classy Art-house and cult B-movie trends. Cronenberg applies the needles of cold logic, and liberal warmth, to present industrial-scaled surrealism, and so create his most explicitly metamorphic character-study since The Fly (1986).
Disc extras:
- Undeniably A Love Story - interview with David Cronenberg
- Things Change - interview with Viggo Mortensen
- The Chaos Inside - interview with Lea Seydoux
- The Heat And The Grime - interview with Kristen Stewart
- The Bureau Man - interview with Don McKellar
- Painkiller - interview with producer Robert Lantos
- The Most Wonderful Dream - interview with cinematographer Douglas Koch
- The Code Of David - interview with editor Christopher Donaldson
- New Flesh, Future Crimes: The Body And David Cronenberg - video essay by Leigh Singer
- The Making of Crimes Of The Future
- Commentary by Caelum Vatnsdal
- Production design materials
- The Death Of David Cronenberg (short film)
