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.
The other change is that people don’t get infections anymore either, so spontaneously cutting into your leg or face in public isn’t a big deal anymore.
That all being said, Saul is clearly in pain, a lot of the time. He sleeps in a nightmarish bed that I hesitate to describe, one which is programmed to adjust and move his body around in order to accommodate his extra organs. He has to sit in a special programmable chair that adjusts his body so that food can slip past whatever the hell is going on in his throat. Before, during and after Saul says anything he grunts, gasps or has to make some other kind of sound so that he can be heard.
Caprice is a former trauma surgeon, and acts at all times like she’s Saul’s ultimate groupie and Yoko Ono all rolled up into one. They don’t have sex as we knew it in the past, but they appear to somewhat get off by performing surgery on each other. Surgery is the new sex, we are told.
Eww. Sorry, it’s fucking gross and I hate it.
Because this is The Future, future bureaucracies spring up because of course they have to. Some kind of bureau demands that people register their new organs whenever they appear, for…reasons. There is this strange theme running through the flick that government forces fear that humans will evolve. Far from seeing these extra organs as tumours, or potential lawsuits for the corporations polluting the planet, homo sapiens fears being replaced by something better. So two of the jerks that work at the Organ Registration place are meant to be doing something official. But these two jerks (Kristen Stewart and mainstay of Canadian cinema Don McKellar) turn out to be the biggest fangirls of Saul’s body of work. And, yes, I hate myself for making that pun.
There’s a lot of other stuff going on, most of which stems from what happens in the opening minutes of the flick, where a mother kills her son because she sees him eating plastic. This points to a larger “conspiracy”, both within humanity itself, which seems to be both paying the price for centuries of polluting the planet, and within governments that maybe wants to exterminate these newly adapted people.
And I didn’t care about any of it. I almost cannot tell you how much I hated almost everything I was watching. But, dear reader, in an example of just what a living fucking saint I am, I think I can actually put that aside to talk about the film semi-objectively.
Maybe it’s an intriguing idea in terms of what’s happening to both this group of people voluntarily making themselves unable to eat the foods we have been accustomed to for millennia, or to those spontaneously born being able to consume what previously killed us. There’s a strong environmental argument there, maybe. I don’t entirely get how that connects to people (for fun) either having their faces shredded in public for entertainment or why a guy covered in ears that are ‘real” but don’t “work” would amuse anyone, but it’s not for me to police what people enjoy.
Maybe the look of the film, from the aesthetics of the nightmare beds and chairs, and autopsy sarcophagi, is strong, and as unsettling as it was intended to be. Maybe Viggo swanning around the streets of Athens dressed pretty much like a ninja is funny, and was meant to be funny. Maybe Kristen Stewart delivering a performance that seems like a parody of a (young) Kristen Stewart performance was intentionally funny. Maybe the painfully awkward way most of the actors deliver their lines throughout the flick was deliberate, was intentional, because in this horrible future no-one but Viggo Mortenson is capable of delivering okay performances.
Maybe, um, the musical score by Howard Shore was really evocative. Maybe the decaying buildings, diseased interiors and feral street of Athens, which I don’t think needed any art or set design work – they always look like that now – added something visually compelling to the mix.
Maybe all of that is true. And maybe it still didn’t matter to me at all, or make any of this a more enjoyable or compelling experience.
I think it was a hard sell from the start when the mother kills her son, in the first minutes of the flick. I’m not saying it set a tone, but as confronting as that was from the start, the boy’s corpse plays an outsize role in the course of the flick. And I couldn’t really understand even in the context of what various people were trying to achieve as to why any of this was being allowed to happen in public view.
I don’t really get why people would fetishize cutting into people’s bodies (consensually, of course) in public would be of mass interest, especially when there is no pain and no danger, anymore, to anyone. People can see that for real already, and I don’t see queues around the block for that nonsense.
It also ignores the fact that the Australian performance artist Stelarc was doing half of the stuff rendered here for our delight / disgust on stage 40 years ago. I guess the future really is the past.
There was this fundamental disconnect, of something basic, that I didn’t get – if people don’t feel pain in the future, why are they using tailor-made and programmed beds and chairs in order to not feel pain? What did I miss – do they only not feel pain on their skin, or outer layers of flesh or does it not include bones or what bullshit distinction is there?
If the flick has a greatest moment, yes, it’s the fact that it ends, after an hour and forty or so minutes. And that was a relief, but this is the rare occasion where a flick I’ve watched that I didn’t enjoy at all and don’t think worked conceptually or thematically pretty much at all, actually has a perfect ending, or at least an ending that’s perfect for this (stupid) movie.
It has a truly perfectly appropriate, even moving, ending. Shame I had to sit through all the other crap as well in order to get there.
4 times and what was the point of getting the zip installed in the skin of his stomach again out of 10
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“He takes the rebellion of his own body and seizes control of it. Shapes it, tattoos it, displays it, creates theater out of it. It has meaning, very potent meaning, and many, many people respond to it.” – I honestly don’t give a fuck any more - Crimes of the Future
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