Directed by: David Cronenberg
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Scott Speedman, Kristen Stewart
Rated R, 107 minutes
The American body is under attack. Last week, the Supreme Court summarily stripped Americans of the constitutional right to an abortion, triggering abortion bans in over a dozen states and setting the stage for several more bans across the country. Meanwhile, the Court also placed limits on states’ abilities to pass gun control, striking down a New York law that had been on the books for over a century. And as if forced birth and death by gunfire weren’t enough, there’s more yet to come; in his concurring opinion in the case that overturned Roe v. Wade, Clarence Thomas called on the Court to next reconsider the decisions that guaranteed marriage equality, sexual privacy, and the right to contraception. Where so much in politics is often just talk, the past week of upheaval has been visceral, an angst felt not only in the soul but in the body. How did things get so dire?
In the wake of these decisions (to say nothing of the ongoing onslaught of legislation around the country intended to intimidate transgender people out of existence), David Cronenberg’s body-mutilation thriller “Crimes of the Future” is astoundingly prescient. It’s excellent, but befitting the moment into which it has arrived, it’s brutal to watch. If you can’t stand needles, knives, blood, or surgery, this film will be a nightmare like no other. And even if you can tolerate such things, there’s still plenty of nightmare to go around.
The future of Cronenberg’s imagination is ghostly and warped, like nuclear fallout. Humans no longer feel pain, so hedonists carve into each other with knives for pleasure. Some people have started developing new internal organs, like the performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen, “Lord of the Rings”), whose partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux, “Blue Is the Warmest Colour”) surgically removes these organs for rapt audiences. Adored by fellow artists and buttoned-up bureaucrats alike, Tenser suffers for his art; pain may have disappeared from human experience, but he still endures constant discomfort.
The central tension of the film, between humans as they are and humans as they are becoming, comes into clear focus with the arrival of the plastic eaters, a cell of deviants who have reconstructed their organs in order to digest industrial waste. Labeled as extremists and criminals by the government, the plastic eaters are menacing yet idealistic, prophets of a brave new world. Their leader, Lang (Scott Speedman, “Underworld”), asks Tenser and Caprice to perform a public autopsy on his dead son in order to spread the gospel of plastic to a wider audience, a proposition that shocks and intrigues the duo.
Cronenberg dwells on this teetering balance between the natural and the unnatural, human and inhuman. Machinery, like the autopsy vessel Tenser and Caprice use for their shows, or Tenser’s tentacled, egg-shaped bed, appears more organic than artificial. People, meanwhile, have become obsessed with the clinical. “Surgery is the new sex,” opines Timlin (Kristen Stewart, “Spencer”), a National Organ Registry employee who falls in love with Tenser. In one scene, she comes onto Tenser only for him to rebuff her with a mild “I’m not very good at the old sex”; in another scene Caprice inserts her tongue into a zippered pouch in Tenser’s abdomen, to his pleasure.
It’s an ambitious and daring project from a director with a long history of exploring the horrors and dubious miracles of the human body. Cronenberg, whose filmography includes a telekinesis thriller (“Scanners”) and an automobile-erotica drama (“Crash”), here meditates on the decline of natural physiology until the very idea of “natural” becomes obsolete. The plastic eaters, hunted down for their dissent against corporeal normalcy, manufacture toxic “candy bars” to sustain themselves when “real” food proves impossible to stomach. “Our bodies were telling us it was time to change,” Lang explains. He is, as we eventually see, an honest man.
There’s little moral conclusion to be drawn from Cronenberg’s reflections on evolution and bodily autonomy, but his reflections are instructive and indelible nevertheless. There is perhaps nothing more human, he suggests, than vehemently, violently resisting the natural evolution of our species. It’s an irony born at the genetic level, which plays out as tragedy at the social level. Exploring this premise in a harrowing and disturbing future, Cronenberg has made an essential film for the harrowing and disturbing present.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 7/1/22.