David Cronenberg always talks a good film. Trumpeting his much-anticipated return to the Cannes film festival’s main competition following an eight-year hiatus from directing, the 79-year-old Canadian cult auteur has been pitching Crimes of the Future as his most shocking work since Crash (1996) scandalised the Croisette. Reclaiming Cronenberg’s rightful place as a pioneering elder statesman of visceral “body horror”, this cerebral sci-fi thriller stars Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart. It also features flesh-slicing close-ups, nudity, fetishistic sex and some mildly unpleasant violence against children. The director has even gleefully predicted walk-outs in the first few minutes.
There were indeed several walk-outs during the first Cannes press screening, but probably not for the reasons Cronenberg was hoping. In its promising first act, Crimes of the Future plays like a greatest hits medley of the director’s career, from its dystopian setting and quietly nightmarish tone to the pulsing, oozing, bio-mechanical production designs that hark back to his 1980s and 1990s psy-fi classics. There are even eroticised wound-licking sex scenes that pay knowing homage to earlier films like Videodrome (1983) and Crash. But this self-referential slime symphony soon begins to drag and plod, recycling queasy obsessions that the director has probed more fully and convincingly before, adding little new to well-trodden terrain.
Indeed, this entire project is something of a retread. Crimes of the Future shares its title with one of Cronenberg’s earliest films, a mid-length cult oddity from 1970, though they are otherwise unrelated. The real roots of this film lie in a shelved feature called Painkillers, which the director almost made with Ralph Fiennes 20 years ago. This retitled and updated version is essentially his first original screenplay since Existenz (1999), sharing some of the same dramatic themes and aesthetic grammar. But while it is heartening that Cronenberg is still willing and able to make such original, personal, slightly pathological work, this latest addition to his cult canon feels lumpy and lifeless. Sometimes he talks a better film than he makes.
The set-up mixes vintage Cronenbergian carnal perversity with a hint of Philip K. Dick’s darkly satirical prophecy. In a grimy near-future society where pain and disease have largely been eradicated by medical science, DIY surgical procedures and exotic body modification have become a new kind of performance art. Saul Tenser (Mortensen) and his lover/collaborator Caprice (Seydoux) are the superstar power couple of this scene, the Jay-Z and Beyoncé of self-inflicted S&M scalpel art. While Saul tempts lethal danger by incubating new alien organs inside his body, Caprice tattoos them with her unique signature before slicing them out in front of rapt audiences. This avant-garde pair are, quite literally, at the cutting edge. So when the chance arises for them to perform a live autopsy on a murdered child as an artwork, they jump at the offer.
Meanwhile, government insiders are increasingly nervous about “desktop surgery” deviants, fearing they could lead to “Evolutionary Acceleration Syndrome”, an unstable new explosion in post-human anatomy. A clandestine monitoring team led by Timlin (Stewart) and Wippet (Canadian actor-director and Crash veteran Don McKellar) aims to establish an official register of “neo-organs”, but an illegal underground rebel group led by Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman) has already evolved a new kind of eco-friendly digestion system that feeds off plastic waste. Double agents, assassins and hard-bitten detectives fight for power in this murky netherworld, with Saul and Caprice caught in the crossfire.
There are fascinating ideas swimming around in Crimes of the Future: the ethical limits of transgressive art, the increasingly blurry line between human and post-human bodies, pain as marketable spectacle, and so on. The remarkable thing is how resoundingly flat Cronenberg renders these themes, sapping away any dramatic tension with laborious plotting, listless pacing, and dialogue so overloaded with humourless portent it risks becoming unintended comedy: “Surgery is the new sex”; “let us not be afraid to map the chaos within”; “how can a tumerous growth be considered art?” That latter question is just begging for a cheap punchline, but let’s not sink that low.
Mortensen has done fine work in several previous Cronenberg features, most notably playing artfully layered anti-heroes in A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007). But here he seems almost catatonic, spending half the film coughing and mumbling inside a monkish robe, delivering his lines in the stentorian sub-bass rumble of a Zack Snyder superhero. Seydoux brings her signature crackling emotional electricity to the party, but this low-voltage story never finds a worthwhile use for it. And pity poor Stewart, burdened with the thankless task of playing a besotted, simpering art-world groupie. At least a pair of psycho-lesbian driller killers offer some enjoyably pulpy fun, but sadly they only figure fleetingly in the plot. We really need to see a movie about their future crimes.
As a technical package, Crimes of the Future is reliably high-end. The graffiti-covered urban exteriors, mostly shot in Greece, radiate alluringly grungy future-noir vibes. The stagey interiors, as in most Cronenberg films, resemble beautifully lit luxury sex dungeons. Carol Spier’s production designs of throbbing bodily organs, bio-morphic technology and skin-peeling surgical procedures are impressively squirmy. And Howard Shore’s ravishingly sinister electro-orchestral score is stirring stuff too, even if it feels like it was written for a much more dynamic, compelling film than this.
Director, screenwriter: David Cronenberg
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman, Welket Bungué, Don McKellar
Producer: Robert Lantos
Cinematography: Douglas Koch
Editing: Christopher Donaldson
Production design: Carol Spier
Music: Howard Shore
Production companies: Serendipity Point (Canada), Telefilm Canada (Canada), Ingenious Media (UK)
World sales: Rocket Science
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
In English
107 minutes
