Open Me Up
CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (David Cronenberg, 2022)
David Cronenberg has been finding creative ways to open up the human body for five decades. Iconic onscreen moments include the exploding head in Scanners (1983) and the terrifying physical deterioration of Jeff Goldblum’s infected scientist in The Fly (1986). My favorite recent example remains the bone-crushing and eye-gouging Turkish bathhouse fight scene in Eastern Promises (2007), where Viggo Mortensen’s naked, tattooed body becomes a canvas for gushing bloody wounds while fending off two hitmen.
With this in mind, it was only inevitable that Cronenberg would eventually turn human flesh into a literal zipper. Crimes of the Future provides just such a jarring image, and many more at that. But the gorier bits merely amplify the devilishly funny and piercing elements of a scathing film that skewers our desperate need to reinvent the soul in a soulless future. For that reason in particular, Crimes of the Future is a cinematic relative of the equally prescient and subversive eXistenZ (1999), an underrated masterpiece in the Canadian master’s canon.
Both films are set in a decaying dystopias where corporations and government institutions try to police the new frontier of technology, physiological evolution, and the digitization of perspective through oppressive means. With this much possibility and innovation at stake, there are those who want to violently retain the status quo and destroy anything new that could enact revolutionary change.
In Cronenberg’s stagnant cavernous vision that is Crimes of the Future, pain no longer afflicts some people. This has led to more extreme acts of public mutilation in the name of art. The human body is changing, and in some cases, creating new organs from the inside out.
What’s sprung from these societal and aesthetic shifts is an underground circuit of performance art featuring those who filet and serrate skin during elaborate demonstrations. These underground horror salons attract fetishists, creepy bureaucrats (hello Kristin Stewart!), and plotting revolutionaries alike. The legendary standard bearers of this movement are Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux).
Crimes of the Future revolves around their metamorphosis from creative duo to separate individuals with diverging political and sexual desires, and all of the eccentrics, assassins, and groupies who operate in in this orbit. As with so many Cronenberg films, the “story” is less important than the creeping momentum driving these characters toward an inevitable reckoning of the body and spirit, and the changing ways of we can potentially process organic and social change.
Many of Cronenberg late period films exist in between genres and tones, creating a pervasive aesthetic strangeness infusing every stylistic and narrative choice. Crimes of the Future is no different. The pacing of this thing is unhurried even as individual scenes crackle with awkward intensity. It appears to be shot on location at the gates of Hell.
A History of Violence (2005), Maps to the Stars (2014), and even Cosmopolis (2012), are all dense cinematic pieces, heavy with the threat of violence and emotionally strip-mined tableaus. But there’s something far more primal going on in Crimes of the Future. This is a film that feels free even as the narrative constructs. It seems to tap into the salacious joys and horrors that we impart on ourselves while society collectively self-destructs.
Many of Cronenberg’s best films deal with the moment something beautiful and transcendent is born from nature only to be warped by the destructive forces of humanity. Crimes of the Future internalizes that theme beautifully, exploring the possibility that our own salvation against climate change could be born from within just as our fear of such a feat is reaching peak crisis.
Crimes of the Future is currently playing in select theaters and is also available to stream here.