Crimes of the Future, Cannes review — David Cronenberg returns to his body-horror roots

David Cronenberg returns to his body-horror roots for the fascinatingly strange Crimes of the Future, in which he imagines a world where physical pain has been all but eradicated and mutilation has replaced sex as the primary source of pleasure. With technology having merged fully with medicine, desktop surgery has become all the rage, humans hacking their physiologies as if installing iPhone updates. But none of this has the sheen of an Apple store, the milieu closer to a grungy underworld of backstreet mechanics.

Viggo Mortensen plays the mysterious Saul Tenser, a cult figure able to grow new organs within himself who has turned their removal into a form of performance art. Wielding the remote-control scalpel is his muse and accomplice Caprice (Léa Seydoux). If Tenser is his own canvas, the easel is an autopsy table, the setting more bondage party than operating theatre. There will be blood, there will be guts and you will need a strong stomach — if not a sick bag. It’s as if after seeing last year’s outré Palme d’Or-winner Titane, Cronenberg has immediately been compelled to return and up the ante.

Having established the inner logic of his freak-show world, the Canadian director weaves a noirish narrative in which designer digestive systems, illegal organ trading and infanticide meet. Saul and Caprice cross paths with the twitchy bureaucrat Wippet (Don McKellar) and his ardent assistant Timlin (Kristen Stewart, looking right at home), who happens to be a Tenser aficionado. While the intricate production design is never less than compelling, it’s the story that doesn’t quite satisfy, the film ending abruptly just when it seems to be gathering a head of steam.

After the more sedate excursions of recent years (A Dangerous Method, Cosmopolis), Cronenberg seems right at home with the material. If the film it most closely resembles is 1999’s Existenz, there are also traces of the sinister sci-fi machinations in Scanners (1981) and the twisted eroticism of Crash (1996). Mercifully, there is no connection to his unwatchable early film also called Crimes of the Future.

For all of the new film’s oddness, the parallels with troubling aspects of 21st-century life are clear enough, with nods to everything from the ethics of genetic engineering and processed foods to the fetishisation of technology. A bed that anticipates your every discomfort seems appealing, but you may think twice about installing a chair made of bones that crunches sickeningly as it spoon-feeds you and looks like something designed by serial killer Ed Gein.

★★★☆☆ 

Festival runs to May 28, festival-cannes.com