David Cronenberg’s ‘Crimes of the Future’ is Not The Same Old Body Horror Song

One of the most remarkable things about David Cronenberg’s new film Crimes of the Future is that it reads like an aggregation of most of his past films while playing and feeling like no other film he’s ever made. It’s not a body horror movie in that it’s not really a horror movie at all: there are no jump scares. There’s a lot of exposed viscera, and the attendant “ick” factor. But the real horror is deep, brooding, existential. And feels genuinely dangerous. 

Any film that presents, with hardly a raised directorial eyebrow, a child murder in its first ten minutes will of course feel dangerous — if it doesn’t feel outright exploitative. But this movie doesn’t. It’s thoughtful, considered, contemplative. 

Its tale of a performance artist in crisis in a desolate but beautiful setting in an unspecified year ahead of our own has a lot of dry humor behind its provocative plot particulars, but it’s a deeply serious picture, as all of Cronenberg’s work has been. 

The crisis of the artist, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) — a character very much opposed, naturally, to one who could be named Saul Looser — has to do with the nature of his art. Saul is able to grow new internal organs. His art partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux), who’s also his lover, tattoos those organs and removes them during the couples’ shows. In this future, pain is mostly a thing of the past. So is contemporary tech: people talk on cordless phones that rather resemble the satellite modules that Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko carried around on his beach walks, in Wall Street. Laptops are absent, as are all computers. Low-res black and white video is captured on devices that look like Flash Gordon Decoder rings. Or by what look like actual film cameras.

Unlike most cinematic dystopian visions, Crimes doesn’t explain How Things Got That Way. At all. That, and the movie’s unusual visual style — depicting a cityscape almost entirely absent of people, evocative in part of the painter de Chirico, and in part of the contemporary director Pedro Costa, but not really intimately close to either — gives the movie an almost stagey feel. And the acting, from stalwarts Mortenson, Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, and Don McKellar, is for the most part highly stylized (Scott Speedman as an intense activist takes the most “naturalist’ approach).

This is where Crimes represents a real break with Cronenberg’s past work. His short features of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Stereo and Crimes of the Future (of which the current Crimes is not a remake but is not as unrelated as the director has asserted in recent interviews) were similarly austere but also less assured in use of film language. But his early full-length features, 1975’s Shivers (also known as They Came From Within), 1977’s Rabid, and 1979’s The Brood are all set in contemporary reality and aspire to a form of verisimilitude. And all of them feed into the new film. 

With Shivers, there’s a scientifically-developed parasite, looking like someone’s nightmare idea of a miniaturized spleen, that turns its host into erotomaniacs. The parasites take over a new apartment complex on an island and ends with an army of the infected driving to take on Montreal. In Rabid, a young woman (porn star Marilyn Chambers; the low-budget tax-shelter indie films of the Canadian ‘70s needed bankable names for the grindhouse fare) gets an experimental skin graft after a motorcycle accident. It has a side effect — a blood-sucking spike in the armpit that feeds on blood. And this, too, is infectious: people who’ve been vampirized develop the title condition. This movie is particularly bracing pandemic viewing for a variety of reasons. And while Cronenberg doesn’t abjure his highbrow side here (it’s hardly possible in general), there’s some still-startling bad taste humor here, including the fate of a shopping-mall Santa. 

By the time he dropped The Brood in 1979, Cronenberg had become a name of sorts (mostly by Canadian shock-movie-subsidy scandal): the title card in the opening credits reads “David Cronenberg’s The Brood.” The skeleton of the story is in very close proximity to that of this year’s Crimes of the Future. The Brood’s anti-heroine is a woman who grows new children pathogenetically, and these sexless creatures go into the world and do her bidding, taking revenge on people she considers threats. Rather different from Saul Tenser’s new organ growths, but not unrelated. 

There’s a performance art component in The Brood too: a new, revolutionary method of psychoanalytic treatment (called “psychoplasmics”) is demonstrated in an auditorium in the movie’s opening scene. Oliver Reed, as Dr. Raglan, relentlessly insults a patient named Michael; as their dialogue continues, it’s clear Raglan is playing the role of Michael’s father. Raglan demands that Michael not TELL about the damage that’s been done to him but show it. Michael lets his robe fall from his shoulders and shows an upper torso covered in hives: “This is me daddy…what you do to me.” (When Cronenberg adapted David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly into a film in 1993, he made a very telling change to the ending. Gallimard’s suicide is in Hwang’s original, but in the film the character kills himself in front of an audience.) 

Cronenberg is in many respects an unusually attuned and at times prescient artist. Watching this scene in The Brood, it brought to mind the confrontational performance art of Karen Finley, whose provocative work (she is the auteur of the notorious piece titled Yams Up My Granny’s Ass, for instance) was not to receive substantial attention until the mid-eighties. Cronenberg’s 1970 Crimes of the Future concerns, among other things, a virus contracted through cosmetics; John Waters’ 1968 underground short titled Eat Your Makeup is about…well, see the title. The line “I wish I could eat your cancer when you turn black” from Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” could have been cribbed from a Cronenberg picture. (It wasn’t.) While critical consideration of Cronenberg tends to focus on how “weird” and “outré” his ideas and his depiction of his ideas are, what he’s dealing with is in fact very mainstream in that it’s unavoidable in life. It’s just the stuff we don’t like to talk about. 

In Crimes, the strange-looking tools and furniture that pop up throughout the director’s filmography, doing double duty as metaphors and surgical tools (or whatever they’re meant to represent) are everywhere, and as they relate to Saul Tenser they’re poignant. Viggo Mortenson swallows (literally almost) his movie-star charisma in this role, moving slowly, constantly clearing his throat, speaking haltingly. He has to sleep in a special bed (a product of Life Form Ware, perhaps the last high-tech company on this particular earth) that looks like a giant nutshell and is suspended by organic tendrils. He eats his breakfast in a chair made out of plastic bone that moves constantly, shifting him around. This is, you begin to intuit after a while, a movie not just about mortality, but specifically about old age. “The Breakfaster” (for that is what the chair is called) might as well be a stair lift. The only times Tenser looks happy is when Clarice is operating on him for an appreciative crowd; then his eyes roll up into the back of his head in an expression of something like erotic ecstasy, inspiring one character to avow “surgery is the new sex.” 

Exacerbating Tenser’s discomfort is the fact that he’s generating new organs at a faster rate than ever before. This dilemma, along with the idiosyncrasies of Tenser’s fan base (many critics have rightly praised Kristen Stewart’s stammering, intense, and intensely awkward portrayal of the character Timlin) bring the comedic touches to the movie. The sequences relating to an apparently highly illegal “Inner beauty Pageant” are likely to make some viewers wonder if they’re funny on purpose. (They are. And yes, the horizontal aperture that Tenser has added to his collection of wounds in anticipation of the contest does recall the human VCR slot of Cronenberg’s 1983 Videodrome.)

As Crimes trots towards its epiphanic ending (not dissimilar to that of Cronenberg’s 1996 Crash) Tenser’s old-school alienation increases. When Clarice comes home after impulsively getting some facial modification (as you may infer if you haven’t seen the movie already, the movie’s world in one in which “cosmetic surgery” has a very expansive meaning) Saul looks at her the way a progressive father might look at a daughter who’s just gotten a tattoo. 

The epiphany at the end of Crimes of the Future is in part an ecological one: “We’ve got to start eating our own industrial waste,” Scott Speedman’s Dotrice rages to Clarice and Saul. His dead son, Brecken, was in fact able to do this. Another character speaks with disgust of Brecken’s saliva after he’d munch on a plastic garbage bin. This takes us all the way back to Cronenberg’s 1970 Crimes of the Future, in which those who have contracted the makeup virus develop “severely pathological skin conditions” and secrete something referred to as “Rouge’s Foam.” 

Riffing on The Brood in 1992, for the essential book Cronenberg on Cronenberg, the filmmaker said: “We’ve certainly changed in a psychological way since the beginning of mankind. In fact, we’ve changed in a physical way as well. We are physically different from our forefathers, partly because of what we take into our bodies, and partly because of things like glasses and surgery. But there is a further step that could happen, which would be that you could grow another arm, that you could physically change the way you look — mutate.”

Crimes of the Future is a movie about mutation that is in itself a mutation. Here Cronenberg, for financial reasons, was persuaded to shoot in Greece rather than Canada, where he has made most of his films. The Greek seaside gave the director, production designer Carol Spier, and cinematographer Douglas Koch a new set of glasses, so to speak. The inspired result is an unexpected late-career variation of almost bottomless richness.  

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.