I am currently fighting a battle against some sort of ivy I planted in a flower bed a long time ago. It started out as green and creamy white and didn’t grow tall enough to lift off the ground. But it eventually evolved into pure green shoots that grew too tall to support themselves. They aggressively filled every inch of space in the bed, and even crept into spaces on the other side of retaining walls.
As I tried digging it up, I marveled at the tenacity of this bastard, as well as the seemingly endless network of its roots. It got me thinking about how it would be interesting if somebody could devise a way to “grow” network cables—if we could create in a lab a vine that could transmit data, then let it grow in a way that would essentially connect devices by a natural process.
Thanks for the enduring that weird, rambling opening. I went through all that because I kept finding myself turning that idea around in my head as I watched 2022’s Crimes of the Future. This is a film about how nature always find a way, even if, in this case, it is a future where the human body keeps trying to evolve into something else.
Viggo Mortensen stars as a man in constant pain, as his body regularly produces internal organs of a type never seen before and which seem to serve no purpose. He is in constant pain and has great trouble eating and sleeping.
Léa Seydoux is his partner is some vaguely defined way, tattooing these new organs while they are in his body (yeah, I didn’t understand either), then removing them before audiences as part of their “performance art.” Oh, wonderful, the primary source of entertainment in future is performance art. We’re fucked.
No surprise this is a movie by David Cronenberg, making a welcome return to the type of body horror he hasn’t explored since 1999’s eXistenZ. I am a huge fan of that film, which many people believe had stolen a few ideas from The Matrix, though any overlaps between those pictures is simply the coincidence of them being released so close to each other. Alas, I feel Cronenberg steals from himself here, as a great many elements echo that earlier movie, and not in a flattering way.
A recurring theme of the 1999 film is technology being applied to organic matter to create terrifying new things, like a game system that is a living being or a gun made entirely of bones and which shoots human teeth. That movie had a telling scene where Jude Law tentatively pokes his tongue into a sphincter-like hole in Jennifer Jason Leigh’s spine where the console plugs into. There is a very similar scene here, just with the gender reversed (and the nature of the hole, come to think of it).
In another strong similarity, there are many creepy devices here that are a synthesis of technology and biology. There is a chair made of bones which jostles Mortensen while he eats, supposedly to improve his digestion. There is a bed that looks like half of a giant walnut shell, suspended from the ceiling by pulsing, twisting tubes of an apparently organic nature. This is the ultimate smart bed: “I think this bed needs new software. It isn’t anticipating my pain anymore”.
Much of the effects work is physical in nature, which I greatly appreciate. That said, something didn’t ring as true about those elements here as similar ones did in eXistenZ. Even worse, some subpar CGI is used to augment the physical effects and these do not work well in conjunction with each other.
This is especially distracting in the performance art segments where Seydoux remotely extracts the organs from Mortensen while he is in a reprogrammed robotic autopsy device. I can understand robots used in surgery, but what would be the point of one to do autopsies? Anywho, the surgery, done while he’s conscious, is gross yet the effect is completely undermined by the unconvincing CGI scalpels cutting him open.
There are all kinds of rules governing the world of this film, with all sorts of groups conspiring against each other. I’ll confess I had a lot of trouble navigating these various alliances and betrayals, until I finally gave up. For some reason, the government wants to stop unauthorized evolution, or maybe they are quietly supporting it—I just don’t know. There is a National Organ Registry that may or may not be a government agency. All I know is the two employees there seem to have very little to do.
One of those employees is Kristen Stewart. She’s…OK here, but I still have yet to see her in anything where she amazed me. That said, I admire how hard she tried to distance herself from the immediate fame of the Twilight series. She plays a very tightly wound character here. Always talking in a whisper and walking with her arms stiffly at her sides, she almost seems to be playing a parody of some sort.
Alas, she gets what may be the dumbest line here with “Surgery is the new sex.” That immediately brought to mind the Elias Koteas line from Cronenberg’s Crash about “reshaping the human body by modern technology.” The thing is, his character later calls out his own bullshit about that, whereas Stewart’s line is treated like it is brilliant.
Another recurring theme here which had me rolling my eyes is the “Inner Beauty” pageant Mortensen seems alternately willing and unwilling to participate in. This seemed a bit too on the nose. Maybe even on multiple noses, like a performance artist here who had ears all over his body, only if he had noses instead. Eh, I thought I had an idea there.
If there is one thread I like through most of Cronenberg’s best (and, not coincidentally, most subversive) films is an underground movement with some very odd ideas. “Long live the new flesh!” “Death to eXistenZ!” So here we have a group who have allowed, and even encouraged, their bizarre new organs to take root and the result was something that genuinely surprised me. Therefore, I will not spoil the surprise for you.
When it comes down to it, my main takeaway from Crimes of the Future is you can control the direction nature decides to take human evolution as little as I can eradicate this goddamn ivy that mutated into something I wasn’t expecting. Alas, this movie feels more like somebody paying homage to classic Cronenberg than a true return to form for the filmmaker. Still, a return to body horror from him is a welcome curiosity, like a slightly disturbing letter than a long-lost acquaintance you never wanted to get that close to.
Dir: David Cronenberg
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart
Watched on blu-ray