Crimes of the Future film review — David Cronenberg adds to his gruesome body of work

In uncertain times, people take comfort where they find it. For some, a warm glow may come with David Cronenberg’s anatomical satire Crimes of the Future. Which future is that? Much the same one the director showed bolder film-goers in the gruesome science fictions of his early career, an unnerving just-around-the-corner.

What does it look like? Well, Cronenberg being Cronenberg, it looks disgusting. “Body horror” was the name given to the queasy likes of Videodrome (1983) and Dead Ringers (1988), before semi-respectability set in around the 2000s. Now the ick is back. The new movie is a grand pageant of troubling growths and weird orifices, just like the old days. How nice, you may think.

Now 79, Cronenberg presents us with an alter ego in performance artist Saul Tenser, another veteran of scandalous reputation, played by Viggo Mortensen. We meet him sleeping uneasily in a deeply Cronenbergian bed, the frame like an upturned bug hung from the ceiling, intravenous limbs plugged into his body. An exoskeletal dining chair is also available. Who needs Eames?

The budget has clearly gone on the furniture, serving not just as interior design but plot point. The bed is a clinical aid for the coming man Saul represents. Strange new organs grow throughout his body, human evolution gone haywire. Life and art conjoined, his condition becomes a show, the star cut open by creative partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) in an act of public surgery. A surrealist cooked breakfast comes to mind. Cronenberg has not lost his gift of the gag.

Or for gags. The cheekbony pomp of performance art is playfully teased. The director always did dry comedy well, however much it was sometimes missed by outraged critics and hardcore fans alike. The cast are in on the joke. Mortensen wears the ghost of a smile even under the knife; Kristen Stewart arrives to trill excitedly as a medical bureaucrat. For dramatic pulse, we have panicked authorities, gastro-radicals, killer Wonka bars.

But the plot is really only there as a frame for chewy ideas about humanity and things to come. The movie might easily have been a slim novella, though that would have meant less movie star flesh. “Sexier means easier funding,” Mortensen notes in the knowing tone you might expect from, say, a seasoned maker of hard-to-market feature films.

Self-awareness is baked in. The title is recycled from a 1970 Cronenberg film, though the two movies share little common thread. The nag of history doesn’t end there. Riffs on designer cosmetic surgery might have appeared in any Cronenberg project of the past five decades. But diagnosing the now and what’s next is still the director’s signature.

Under the drollery and beyond the innards is a fatalistic vision of environmental collapse and a tart retort to fonder blueprints of the future. Cronenberg, you suspect, has kept tabs on Mark Zuckerberg’s plans for 21st-century living, the Facebook founder’s virtual Metaverse a place to transcend our physical selves and the real world we have made. Think again, the movie says, the tone suddenly wintry. The body is not so easily escaped.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from September 9