Review: Crimes of the Future

When we last saw David Cronenberg some eight years ago, he was polarizing critics with a string of oddball dramas. The king of body horror made a hard prestige pivot after the tremendous success of 2005’s A History of Violence, alienating some fans—and friends—in the process.

With Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg completes his hero’s journey. He returns to body horror with over two decades of lessons learned, and the result may be his most effective work since A History of Violence.

Crimes of the Future is a pulpy movie (in more ways than one). It may be misleading to call it “horror;” it’s a neo-noir in a body horror shell, sometimes literally. Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux) are a pair of performance artists in a future obsessed with surgery and biohacking. They become wrapped up in an underground conspiracy while flirting with their most daring performance yet.

At the same time, his time spent away from sci-fi has clearly given Cronenberg a renewed sense of focus. Set in Greece, the film’s futurism feels tied to the entire history of European art, which it employs for both tone and satire. Tone is another element that here feels drawn from Cronenberg’s recent experiments.

Believe it or not, Crimes of the Future is a chill, almost comforting film. While there’s plenty of shock value, it takes place in a world desensitized to surgery, wounds, and new flesh. As the story fades into something of a hardboiled detective drama, you start to share the characters’ indifference to these carnal reformations.

As Kristen Stewart’s Timlin insists, “surgery is the new sex.” Stewart’s role was smaller than I anticipated, but she absolutely brings the house down. Her mousy demeanor and barely-restrained horniness turn the iconic tics of her Twilight performance on their head. It’s a stellar, transformative performance, and also an immensely funny one.

Crimes of the Future isn’t the funniest movie of the year, but it’s definitely up there. Despite opening on a brutal scene of filicide, it otherwise finds ample humor in its bleak, awkward characters and the desensitized world they occupy. We see a dancer covered in ears, his eyes and mouth sewn shut… and then immediately hear characters trash-talking him as a hack.

Like all great satires, it also flirts with some profound philosophy. Questions of pain and human nature are just an appetizer for the film’s primary focus: a group of rebels who’ve hacked their bodies to digest plastic and other synthetic materials.

Despite turning organs into art, Saul is nihilistic about these advancements. The government agents he encounters on his journey are concerned with preventing humans from being overtaken by a new species. These conflicts intertwine with a series of suspicious killings and shady characters, all convening around an autopsy Saul is asked to perform live on camera.

The closest movie I can think of to compare Crimes of the Future to is Blade Runner. It’s a funny, moody, grimy future-noir anchored by a stellar cast and world-class direction. It’s also, crucially, a through-and-through Cronenberg movie. His unmistakable techno-gore is never too far away, nor are all his favorite subjects of personal turmoil and ethical confusion.

It’s a fun thought exercise to find the intersection between Cronenberg’s two worlds. You might get more out of Eastern Promises knowing that it’s by the director of eXistenZ. But Crimes of the Future is the film that truly brings it all together. It’s a great crime movie, balancing a tangled web of motives without a single beat out of place. A

Crimes of the Future is now in theaters.