Crimes of the Future
This is probably the tamest poster I could find
dir: David Cronenberg
2022
Who feels like an ungrateful piece of shit? I feel like an ungrateful piece of shit!
What kind of churl doesn’t appreciate a new film coming out from Canadian grandmaster director David Cronenberg? He’s been making great, GREAT films for like nearly 50 years!
I’m not even going to list them. Don’t even look them up. If you know, you know.
Anyway, just to short circuit a preamble that could run for pages, I did not like this fucking film. At all.
And I don’t feel great about it. I am sure the problem is me, and not any part of the film. I don’t like seeing scenes of surgery in this, the real current world that we live in, which only seems fictional some of the time.
In fact, I loathe seeing scenes of surgery. A lot of this film is surgery as performance art, as seduction, as something to do when you’re bored or curious, so even though there aren’t “real” scenes of surgery, and I realise it’s all latex and practical effects and such, fuck that, and ewww.
I mean, after all, what did I expect? This is Cronenberg. He didn’t invent “body horror”, but he perfected its cinematic realisation. This is his fucking bread and butter. To have wanted or expected anything else is a form of unproductive madness.
I don’t know why this seems like it was definitely shot in Greece, definitely during one of the pandemic lockdowns, but it was. Neither Greece nor the pandemic play any part in the story, seeing as it’s set in the future, but it’s hard not to laugh at some of the stuff that happens and wonder if it’s a stylistic choice or a covid protocol.
Viggo Mortensen, whatever my complaints with the flick, does not put in a bad performance. He’s not capable of it. I can’t remember the last time I saw him be less than great in anything he was in, and it’s not about to goddamn happen now, not even in a shitty, ill-considered film overflowing with sci-fi bollocks.
Viggo (yes, we are on a first name basis, thanks for asking) plays a chap called Saul Tenser. Saul, like many people in this future hellscape, is afflicted with a body that spontaneously creates new organs. It is a painful process, but, after all, artists are said to have to suffer for their art.
In this cowardly, old future world, humans have changed. Not because of genetic engineering or choice, or anything. But possibly because of what they’ve done to the environment. People don’t feel pain anymore, in the sense that they don’t feel pain in their skin or limbs (I guess? I never really completely understood this aspect), and they have new organs popping up. Saul and his fellow performer Caprice (Lea Seydoux) perform surgeries (on him) for audiences where these new organs are extracted and displayed for all to see.
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