Crimes of the Future: Meandering to Nowhere

There is no doubt that David Cronenberg is the first name most people think of when they think of body horror, or horror based on vast deformations of the human body. His work on Shivers, The Fly, Videodrome, and Rabid solidify him as one of the best horror directors still working today. That said, Crimes of the Future does not live up to the hype, let alone the hype established by an audience walk out at the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last month.

The general conceit of the narrative is that humans have evolved to stop feeling pain so both art and intimacy have taken on a very grotesque and morbid form as people perform surgery on each other. For someone in the market to see a director push the envelope, this sounds like a perfect recipe for a memorable experience. The problem is that the visuals do not quite push the envelope as far as it should have. There are some moments that will make audiences feel uncomfortable, especially considering the film opens with the murder of a child, however the actual “grisly imagery” as the MPAA rating points out are not entirely well executed. It is more unsettling than anything, but even the moments that are unsettling are fleeting at best.

The fact that these moments do not stick the landing just makes the periods between these moments seem longer and more drawn out. The periods spent following the cast when they aren’t doing surgery on each other or watching other people do surgery to each other are carried by strong acting performances, but the plots are nonsensical. At one point Saul (Viggo Mortensen) ends up entering a beauty contest because of his spontaneously growing internal organs, however this subplot goes absolutely nowhere. Maybe had this been dropped, the environmentalist subtext that is just dumped into exposition in the third act could get more of an opportunity to be explored.

The strongest thing the movie has going for it is the biopunk aesthetic that a lot of the technology has. The technology may be nonsensical, and it does not make a ton of sense, but it looks cool. There is a bed/sleeping apparatus that has fleshy-looking tendrils that connect to the users hands and a chair for eating to promote proper digestion that looks like a skeleton that are both very unsettling to look at. The visuals around the autopsy table that is used for the surgery art are cool, even if the effects are not the best. The remote that is used by Caprice (Lea Seydoux) and Saul to operate said table has some interesting design around it, but this is not enough to carry everything else across the finish line.

Considering how much of the narrative does not make sense while the visuals are not the most impressive, Crimes of the Future is probably not something that is going to engage an audience member who is not already committed to seeing something made by Cronenberg. If they are not already at that point, they probably will not enjoy this movie, and even so they probably will find very little to enjoy about it. That said, if someone wants to see it, it is playing in theaters.

Final Rating: 6/10