Hold onto your chest-vaginas: David Cronenberg is back.
I’m not referring to a prolonged absence from filmmaking; though it has been seven years since his last directorial effort (2015’s underrated Maps to the Stars), that’s not a terribly long stretch for a mid-budget filmmaker these days, especially when you factor in a multi-year pandemic. Rather, I mean that David Cronenberg, as he exists in the public imagination, has well and truly returned. It has been roughly twenty years since the director released his most recent film which could reasonably be considered “body horror.” In the decades since, Cronenberg has shifted toward dramas like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, films no less disturbing than his earlier work, but which couldn’t help but feel like a step toward something closer to the mainstream. Gone were the exploding heads and unnatural orifices that one generally associates with the director; the king of body horror, it seemed, had moved on to horror of the mind.
Until now. In Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg has directed perhaps the most “David Cronenberg” film of his career– and while this may say more about me than the film itself, I was grinning from ear to ear for nearly its entire running time.
Latter-day Cronenberg collaborator Viggo Mortensen returns as Saul Tenser, a futuristic performance artist with a most unusual medium: his body, seemingly at least partially of his own will, generates new, previously unknown organs. His partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux), a former doctor, uses nanotechnology to tattoo the organs while they’re still inside his body, then removes them before crowds within underground art spaces (as with the automotive exhibitionists in Crash, I found myself wondering how these shows are promoted– do they print flyers?). The organs are then donated to a fly-by-night organization called the National Organ Registry, operated by the eccentric Wippet (Cronenberg regular Don McKellar) and his even more eccentric assistant, Timlin (Kristen Stewart), a twitchy young woman who doesn’t seem like a person who sees very much of the sun. The NOR lovingly sketches and catalogs each organ before destroying it; if the owner of a new organ passes this gene onto their offspring, the child will technically be something other than human, which would open a whole new can of worms from a legal standpoint.
It is after a particularly successful show that Saul is approached by a suspiciously healthy-looking young man named Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman) with a curious proposal: Lang suggests that Saul and Caprice could expand their act from organ removal to live autopsies, and offers them the corpse of his young son, Brecken. Brecken, you see, possessed not just a new organ, but an entirely new digestive system, allowing him to feast upon plastic wastebins and scrap metal like they were candy. Smelling a rat, Saul reaches out to Detective Cope (Welket Bungué) of the New Vice Unit, seemingly the only actual government agency with any jurisdiction over these activities, and begins learning some disturbing truths about Lang and his housemates– but not disturbing enough to call off the autopsy show.
Though no one could accuse Cronenberg’s recent films of being impersonal, one gets the sense that Crimes of the Future represents all the ideas the director has been bottling up for the past twenty years. Nearly every prop or piece of furniture is a triumph of Gigeresque production design. Saul’s bed is a sort of enormous, fleshy jolly-jumper, complete with tendrils which connect to his hands and feet (“I think this bed needs new software,” Saul complains in a bit of gloriously Cronenbergian dialog, “It’s not anticipating my pain.”). He eats breakfast in a contraption which looks like a dentist’s chair made of bones, which spasmodically rocks back and forth while spoonfeeding its occupant. Caprice conducts her remote surgery with a waist-mounted device resembling a cross between a scarab beetle, a Simon game, and a certain bit of private anatomy. Every object in this movie is made of flesh, covered in dirt, or both, and nearly every character either experiences or inflicts some sort of mutilation previously undreamed of by human brains. I really shouldn’t have to say this about a film by David Cronenberg, but those with weak stomachs may want to sit this one out.
What might not be obvious, however, is just how much fun this movie is– at least, to those on the director’s warped wavelength. More than perhaps any of his films since Dead Ringers, there is a perverse but undeniable sense of humor which makes the unsettling proceedings a bit more palatable than they might be. When asked about the seemingly inaccurate name of the New Vice Unit, for example, Cope shrugs: “It sounds sexier. Easier to get funding that way.” McKellar and Stewart are a hoot in their nerdy enthusiasm for Tenser’s unnatural organs, as are Nadia Litz and Tanaya Beatty as a pair of cheerful autopsy table repair technicians. Indeed, while a cursory glance would register the setting of this film as a dystopia, its characters wouldn’t seem to agree; most of them seem to be having the time of their lives, even as their bodies mutate and decay around them.
The thing about Cronenberg is that he uses body horror as a medium, but not necessarily as subject matter. Videodrome may be filled with writhing bio-technical orifices, but it’s about the expanding media landscape of the 1980s. Naked Lunch uses its body horror elements to tell a story about the creative process, while the shocking violence of Crash is used to explore the outer limits of human sexuality. And though Crimes of the Future contains some of the most disturbing imagery of the director’s career, what it ultimately boils down to is a satire of the art world– and quite a funny one at that. While there is a backbeat concerning the coulds and shoulds of science, Saul’s arc is primarily one of the tortured artist, pushing his own expression while struggling against imitators, outside forces, and the ambitions of his assistant (multiple characters question, not unreasonably, whether Caprice is the true artist of the duo). In perhaps the film’s funniest reveal, the “ear man,” so heavily promoted in the film’s advertising, turns out to be a performance artist himself, performing an interpretive dance while a portentous voice booms, “Don’t speak! Don’t see! Listen!” Cronenberg has been shocking moviegoers longer than many of his imitators have been alive; Saul Tenser may be as much of an avatar for the aging artist as Rick Dalton was for Quentin Tarantino.
Compared directly to Cronenberg’s earlier work, Crimes of the Future may be a little bit of a letdown; on an aesthetic level, the realities of digital filmmaking and the current economic landscape simply don’t allow for the sumptuously tactile 35mm films the director was able to turn out in the ‘80s. But the feel is there, that dreamily upsetting, should-I-be-watching-this headspace that only Cronenberg has truly mastered (aided by the noir-inflected score by longtime accomplice Howard Shore). David Cronenberg has earned his share of plaudits over his nearly half-century career– two awards at Cannes, six films in the Criterion Collection, royalty status among the Fango set– but I feel like he still doesn’t quite receive his due as one of the most truly unique filmmakers working in any genre. Simply put, nobody makes films like David Cronenberg, and while some surely consider that a blessing, I hope he keeps turning out his brainy, fleshy fantasies for years to come.
Crimes of the Future
2022
dir. David Cronenberg
107 min.
Opens Friday, 6/3 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
