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

Crimes of the Future is a return to science fiction from director David Cronenberg, starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart.

Art is painful and unpredictable in Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg’s latest film. As a work of art itself, though, Crimes of the Future has a remarkable amount 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 — or the birth of a new one. It’s a film whose tagline is “surgery is the new sex,” but the results are less shocking and more pleasurable than they might sound.

Crimes of the Future is (presumably) set in the future, but there’s little indication as to when or where. It takes place in a grimy metropolis where technology ranges from camcorders and CRTs to fleshy jellyfish-like anesthetic beds. Rusting boats lie half-submerged on a beach on the edge of town, where rotting plastic pollutes the sand. Most of the population has become inured to pain and disease, and they’ve 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 (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux), who live in an abandoned industrial facility equipped to treat Tenser’s strange physical quirks.

Tenser is revered among future-bohemians for his unprecedented 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 Milton Bradley Simon game was eaten by a deep-sea isopod. Tenser’s new parts are then cataloged by a ramshackle organization called the National Organ Registry, which is run by the avuncular Wippet (Don McKellar) and the high-strung Timlin (Kristen Stewart). The rare skeptic of organ art is Detective Cope (Welket Bungué), a “New Vice Unit of Justice” agent on the trail of an extremist group. (He admits the bureau name was chosen to sound cool.)

https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/30/23141172/crimes-of-the-future-david-cronenberg-review

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