Crimes of the Future. MA15+, 108 minutes. 2 stars
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You've got to hand it to David Cronenberg: he's a survivor. The Canadian filmmaker, now 79, has been making movies for more than half a century and despite occasional forays into the mainstream, he can't be accused of having sold out. His films as director - and sometimes, but not always, writer - tend to be personal, imaginative, challenging and adult - if not for all tastes and often not for the squeamish.
All those descriptors fit his latest, Crimes of the Future (sharing its title but apparently nothing else with a 1970 Cronenberg film, his second).
It's another in a long line of the so-called "body horror" films he's made, but it's more science fiction than horror. Instead of the bulging veins and exploding heads of Scanners and the gross metamorphosis of a man into The Fly, we get a scenario that requires a fair bit of background, resulting in some clumsy information dumps for the benefit of the audience as well as some of the characters.
Cronenberg wrote the script and directed and while there are moments that might ring bells for fans of his previous work, there's a lot that's novel.
Crimes of the Future is set in a future where technology has advanced to the point that machines can interact with and control human bodies much more than before, even if the "chairs" and other apparatuses look somewhere between aliens and torture devices.
In addition, "accelerated evolution syndrome" has led to most people no longer feeling pain or contracting infectious diseases. While this has its benefits - surgery can now be performed without the patient being placed under anaesthetic - it's also a major change: pain is, well, painful but is also a warning system that something is wrong. And that's not all: some people are growing vestigial organs. Some have them on the outside - there's a striking sequence of a dancing man with ears all over his body who has sewn his eyes and mouth shut - and some inside, like Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen, a frequent Cronenberg actor).
In what might be a sort of "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade" notion, Saul is part of a renowned performance art act: Caprice (Léa Seydoux) removes and tattoos these useless organs for audiences. But Saul does feel pain and needs various devices to relieve pain and help him eat. Talk about suffering for your art - but apparently Saul is committed to this.
And there are other changes happening to people: an early, vivid moment has a young boy sitting on a bathroom floor eating a plastic rubbish bin (his system has evolved to the point that he can digest it).
Things get a bit hazy when Saul and Caprice meet with government officials from the National Organ Registry, a body that uphold the state's restrictions on human evolution by cataloguing newly evolved organs. One of the officials says that "surgery is the new sex" and in Cronenberg's world, that might well be true.
Then the police want Saul's help in infiltrating a radical evolutionist cell, which has its own agenda.
Crimes of the Future is well made and well acted and thought-provoking. As often happens with Cronenberg, it's all a bit cold and detached, like he - and we - are watching his characters through a microscope in a petri dish. It is sometimes a bit hard to follow and the world of the film seems grim, dingy and underpopulated.
I wonder what the film might have been like if someone else had directed Cronenberg's script. The storyline might be a bit clearer, the characters less cold, the world a bit more lively and the tone a bit less clinical. But it's hard to see Cronenberg ceding control.