Crimes Of The Future Review: Inner Beauty Pageants

In a crumbling future in which pain receptors have dulled and infections virtually vanished, Saul (Viggo Mortensen) and his partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux) make their living on a growing performance art scene involving body modification and public surgery. Saul's specialty is mining his body for organs it produces with no apparent function, cultivating them until Caprice can publicly cut them out in front of an audience. For Saul, it's a vital statement about the changing state of humanity itself, an effort to control some genetic rebellious streak in his own body.

But for other people in this dark future, it's something else entirely. Thanks to run-ins with members of the newly formed Human Organ Registry, including the meek but fascinated Timlin (Kristen Stewart), and an encounter with a grieving father (Scott Speedman) with evolutionary concerns of his own, Saul starts to realize he's part of something bigger, something beyond performance.

It's probably no accident that Cronenberg chose now to make a body horror film in which a core concept is people opening themselves up to the world for the sake of performance. In an age of social media, confessional YouTube, and celebrities making brands out of their own personal struggles, it's both thrilling and compelling to watch one of our finest genre auteurs craft a world in which specialized wellness products exist specifically for Saul's kind of lifestyle, and in which a person can become a celebrity simply by opening fissures in their faces or daring to cut their abdomens open in full public view. The thematic weight of it, and the parallels to things like fandom, parasocial relationships, and the internet's notion that everyone is meant to be a kind of open book, is apparent from the opening scenes.

But Cronenberg has never been a filmmaker who uses his particular interests as a blunt instrument to draw one-to-one connections with the real world, and to underscore that he pulls "Crimes of the Future" further away from our reality than even the sci-fi grit of "The Fly" or the operatic heights of "Dead Ringers." The world is recognizable, yes, but Cronenberg's tweaks to the infrastructure we recognize create a grungy, noir-influenced parallel universe without smartphones, where the techno-organic has replaced the sleek minimalism of our devices, perhaps because this world used them all up until they were garbage. There's a sickly quality to the imagery, full of yellowed light and drapey clothing. Saul in particular looks almost skeletal beneath the flowing black tunic he's always sporting, creating a portrait of a man wasting away in a world that might not have use for him much longer. It's within this aesthetic that Cronenberg and his characters go beyond the theatrical and into something deeper and darker.