Crimes of the Future review: extreme surgery and classic film noir

Crimes of the Future is David Cronenberg's latest film. Crimes of the Future has a lot of polish. The movie brings Cronenberg back to science fiction for the first time in two decades, and it melds his signature squishy body horror with a luxuriant retro-futuristic aesthetic and a murky but carefully traced story about artists at the end of the world. The film's slogan is "surgery is the new sex", but the results are less shocking and more pleasurable than they might suggest.

There is no indication as to when or where Crimes of the Future will be. It takes place in a grimy metropolis where technology ranges from camcorders and CRTs to anesthetic beds. There is a beach on the edge of town where boats are half-submerged in the sand. Most of the population has becomeured to pain and disease, and they have begun to grow mysterious new body parts. The only remaining art form in this future is extreme surgery, and its virtuoso performers are a duo named Saul Tenser and Caprice, who live in an abandoned industrial facility equipped to treat Tenser.

Tenser is revered by future-bohemians for his ability to grow novel internal organs. Caprice extracts these in live performances with an eerie surgery machine composed of bones, caressing a controller that looks like a game was eaten by a deep-sea isopod. The new parts are cataloged by a ramshackle organization called the National Organ Registry, which is run by the avuncular wippet and the high-strung Timlin. The agent on the trail of an Extremist group is the rare skeptic of organ art. He admits the bureau name sounded cool.

There is a lot of classic Cronenberg visual language here, including an obsession with grotesque-yet-sensual disfigurement. In the vein of Brazil or City of Lost Children, the shadowy sets and placeless glamour evoke the broader tradition of German Expressionist-influenced sci-fi noir. The film's dialogue feels like a twisted pastiche of a Humphrey Bogart script.

Everyone's loyalties are sometimes inscrutable in a good film noir. Bureaucratic agencies seem to operate at cross-purposes with no real government to guide them. A powerful corporation is located around the edges of the world, but it has a pair of mechanics who undress in front of clients. The world-weary Tenser is tired from playing several sides of a conflict. While the film isn't very fast-paced, it's not always obvious where the long conversations and meditative surgical scenes are going.

Cronenberg predicted that Crimes of the Future would make viewers walk out of screenings, and some attendees did just that at the premiere. It has all the trappings of splatterpunk body horror: skeletons split skin like ripe fruit, facial features grow where they shouldn't, and characters are aroused by bloody, yonic wounds.

The film is glossy and stylized, which makes it sound more out of place than it is. Unlike Cronenberg's best-known violence-as-sex movies Crash and Videodrome, there is no sense of new techno-culture encroaching on our own world. The bodies are often invulnerable. The violence enacted on them rarely lasts. The characters themselves seem so unfazed that it's hard to watch a film like Julia Ducournau's Titane. The results of surgery are less shocking than they would be if they were old sex.

The horror hits hardest in parts that aren't overly bloody, such as when a character eats something, which ends up producing scenes that are more quietly disturbing than the film's surgical feats. The central mystery of Crimes of the Future is the nature of the accelerated evolution syndrome. At first, it seems like the human body is malfunctioning, and Tenser considers the changes a curse, his art is an attempt to maintain control over his own flesh as it tries to transform into something new. It is a necessary adaptation for an ugly future, like the criminal group New Vice is pursuing.

The group is trying to push humanity toward a form that can survive by consuming the plastic pollution that is pumped into the environment. Scott Speedman wants his son's performance to reveal an enigmatic and important truth. Crimes of the Future's characters are caught between a decadent, decaying old world and a miserably efficient new one, and it's not clear what the most brilliant art can do to change that.

The intersection of Crimes of the Future's baroque metaphors about art and its environmental themes is compelling. The sci-fi version of an eternal debate over aesthetic and meaning, with fans who love their work for precisely the wrong reasons, is what Tenser and Caprice are stuck in. The futuristic surgical art scene is full of pretentious people who are still capable of delivering an entertaining speech or satisfyingly grotesque set piece, but they are not as well-known as the fine art counterpart.

It is easy to read meaning into Crimes of the Future. Climate change, pollution, and intergenerational conflict are very contemporary anxieties that the film taps into. Just be careful of the microplastics, it's more satisfying to fall into a weird, gorgeous exploration.

The movie Crimes of the Future will be released on June 3rd.