Somewhere in Cronenberg’s Middle

Reel Reviews
By Dylan Marsh
Crimes Of The Future, the newest feature film from famed body horror director David Cronenberg is the sideshow attraction of the year. The film follows Saul Tenser(played by Viggo Mortensen), a morbid visual arts performer, who’s newly grown organs are taken out as a crowd of hip-looking twenty-somethings take polaroids and film on handheld analog cameras.

Tenser, dressed like Ingmar Bergman’s Death, looks to be on the verge of it at any moment. The meta-narrative of the aging performer hoping to stay relevant is a constantly changing grotesque world and how that relates to the 79-year-old Cronenberg is not lost on the audience. Die hard fans of the director that may be expecting visually striking effects and demeted horror may be disappointed with a movie about an artist growing old and his assistant hoping to push the boundaries. The new spectacle is ultimately lighter than the auteurs previous outings.

The film takes place in a not unfamiliar apocalyptic vision of a world ravaged by consumerism and pollution, young people seek out the next exciting exhibition of body horror and cause self harm in the streets, the world around them falling into disrepair. Biotechnological advances, seen mostly in Tenser’s home, have made incredible technological advances, but seemingly not much else has followed its trajectory. Human beings have seemingly begun to evolve to suit their surroundings including growing new organs and losing the ability to feel pain. It is in this newfound inability to feel pain that human beings begin to perform surgery on each other, or as Timlin (played by an incredibly adept Kristen Stewart) calls it “the new sex”.

Tenser wakes up each morning in his vaginally shaped, constantly moving bed that monitors his pain receptors. He eats his breakfast of mush in a sharply shifting chair that appears to be made of bone and is meant to aid in his digestion. Aside from the surgical performances, these two places seem to be the only spots that Tenser seems to be at ease. Caprice (played by Léa Seydoux), his live-in romantic/artistic partner, performs shows using technology meant for autopsies in what is plainly laid out as a psychosexual event, where she removes Tensers newly formed organs. A newly formed government agency who would lead the people to believe that the new organs are the side effect of a disease, something to be removed. A small resistance argues that it is the next step in our natural evolution, and Tenser lands somewhere in the middle, uncertain if he has been given a gift or a curse.

The visual machinery and gore of it all is very much within Cronenberg’s wheelhouse but is far from the best showing he has made to date. That all to say, when considering the Marvels and The Batmans of it all, this disturbing film has made its psychological mark on this year’s films. The director asks us what we are willing to give up for our art, while the cast speaks with the shortness of breath of someone having the life squeezed out of them at any given moment.

Ultimately though the film’s failings are the ways in which Cronenberg throws too many ideas at the wall and none of them seem to stick quite as he had hoped. The film balances on a tightrope between blood and guts horror and a melancholic examination of a life unfulfilled. While examining ideas like art, life, death, transformation, sexuality, and what it means to be human, we are asked how far would we go to realize those things for ourselves. Crimes Of The Future might not be your typical date night movie, but it’s certainly worth seeing.