Body art
Crimes of the Future, the second film of that title directed by David Cronenberg, is two contradictory things at one and the same time. On the one hand, it's the director's return to fleshy grotesques, more than two decades after he abandoned his characteristic mode of body horror (a term he does not use) for less extreme stories of human beings whose bodies are more or less intact and healthy. On the other hand, it's more or less completely disinterested in revisiting past glories, or even providing us "good old-fashioned Cronenberg"; to be frank, I hardly think calling it body horror is accurate, given that it's distortions and corruptions and modifications to the human form are presented as somehow not very horrifying at all. It feels as much like the director is revising his old films as much as he's revisiting them; the very act of returning to the title of 1970's Crimes of the Future (Cronenberg's second feature-length project, and the last before 1975's Shivers started his career in "mainstream" "commercial" filmmaking) for this film, which was titled Painkillers in its first draft, feels like an attempt to reclaim the title from his younger self, who had absolutely no idea what he was doing (and indeed, Crimes of the Future '70 is one of his very worst films), and whose view of the world was very different than it is now that he's 79 years old and presumably in the last stage of his career. Heck, the fact that we have this film at all is a bit of a surprise present; his last film, Maps to the Stars, came out eight years ago, leading to the longest gap in his career, and while nothing about that feels like a valedictory work, Cronenberg's name simply hasn't really cropped up much of anywhere in the time since.
It's at least somewhat disingenuous to act like he's come up with that valedictory work now. Crimes of the Future was first written at the very end of the 1990s, around the time that Cronenberg was also working on eXistenz, which came out in 1999. That film is probably the closest thing we have to a reasonable comparison in the filmmaker's canon (I can probably pin it down a bit more: it feels like eXistenZ had a baby with 1983's Videodrome, and I'm sure we can all agree what a messy conception and violent birth it must have been), sharing a visual sensibility, especially in the prop design, and a certain distinct amount of curiosity about the evolutionary possibilities of the fleshy human body, rather than the revulsion of things like Videodrome or the 1986 remake of The Fly or really most of Cronenberg's films up to and probably including 1991's Naked Lunch). Crimes of the Future indeed offers the suggestion that all the things that make body horror horrifying are perhaps better thought of as interesting, and that the violent mortification of the flesh can be a celebratory act rather than a destructive one.
That's pinning the film down to one reading, and I do think part of the great appeal of Crimes of the Future is how open-ended it is in almost every possible way. Cronenberg's filmography is rarely didactic and generally lets us find our way into the story and emotions being kicked off, but even so, this script is intensely allergic to explaining things in a neat and tidy way. And I do need to emphasise "neat and tidy", since there's also a sense in which explaining things is basically all that Crimes of the Future ever does; it just doesn't explain them in the order that would make sense if the priority was making sure the story could be easily followed and predicted in advance, and some of the things it explains are basically irrelevant. It drops us into its world rather than building it, which is to my mind a deeply satisfying way of letting the feel of this decaying, dysfunctional future rise the fore, rather than than bogging us down with the explanation of it that has very little do with that feeling.
Suffice it to say, then, that the world has born witness to a couple of extraordinary biological developments in the human race. One of them is that virtually every human being has lost the ability to feel pain, and at the same time (though perhaps not for related reasons) a susceptibility to infection. Another is that the rate of mutation in human bodies has exploded, leading to a remarkable increase in the number of new organs being formed, most of them with no apparent function. Somewhere along the way, these changes encouraged a profound shift in the relationship of humans to their bodies and the bodies of others, and society has been taken over by a new fad for performance art involving surgery and body modification. And this gets us to our main characters, two of the most important and influential of these new performance artists, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux). Saul is a rare example of a human who can still feel pain, and he's also growing new organs at a prodigious rate, and the pair have made a great success of their shows in which Caprice removes Saul's "novel organs" in front of an audience, having previously tattooed them with unique art while they were still in his body.
That's really more the set-up than the story, but the story is such a spiraling affair full of incidental details that feel important but aren't, and plot points that aren't important but get summarily tossed-off, I don't honestly know how to summarise it without just giving a transcript. The film is a grab bag of ideas, both about the way this future society functions and how we conceive of our embodied selves here and now, and it also has plenty of what I can only think of as notions, things that don't add anything but a sense of flavor and atmosphere. These include major things such as entire characters, like the erratic bureaucrats Wippet (Don McKellar, a Canadian national treasure appearing in just his second Cronenberg film - the first was eXistenZ, which hardly feels coincidental) and Timlin (Kristen Stewart, appearing in her first Cronenberg film, which feels like the most natural home she could ever have found for her most interesting instincts), who may or may not officially exist, and who keep entering Saul's life as a pair of peculiar alien forces - Timlin in particular, a pent-up fangirl turned into something throughly unnvering in Stewart's performance, maybe the best in the film and definitely the most distinctive, with her entire body seeming to twist around with awkward enthusiasm that matches the brittle choppiness of her line deliveries.
It all combines to create a clear, if not necessarily cohesive sense of a world that has broken along so many fracture lines that cohering would maybe feel like cheating anyways. The details shift along the way, but the overwhelming vibe of the movie is of an environment that's gone so far wrong that the only way to survive it is to go wrong oneself. So we have an opening sequence in which a child is smothered to death, and this somehow feels calming rather than horrifying; we have remarkable location shooting in Athens, which was selected for financial reasons but whose landscape of aging buildings inspired Cronenberg greatly, and has manifested in the completed film, under the hand of production designer Carol Spier, as a sense of wall-to-wall decay and collapse, a world whose human vitality leeched out long ago (the only visually attractive location in the whole movie is the sunlit ocean, seen only in the very first scene - no coincidence that it's the only "natural" setting we ever see). We have Howard Shore's score, one of the best he's ever provided in his long career of writing terrific music for Cronenberg films, sounding a little like electronica if electronica was for funerals instead of dance clubs; it's used with some restraint, and every time it shows up, it gives the movie a hard jolt towards feeling tetchy and uncomfortable - exactly as our protagonist spends the whole movie, so it all fits.
For all the film is about the world as a whole, it's also very particularly focused on Saul Tenser, played by Mortensen with an acute sense of who this person is and he forces himself to function, barely, in the world; he genuinely acts sick and in pain, wearing his character's peculiar costume (a black clock, black clothing, and a black mask, leaving just his gaunt eyes) as if it was both a comforting protection and also a heavy imposition, and speaking with an intermittent gurgle. Given the film's arc of find ways of being comfortable in a world pointedly driven to create disease in it its most pedantically literal sense, dis-ease, it's crucial that Saul comes across as profoundly uncomfortable in his skin, in the freakish organic beds and chairs the movie demonstrates for him, in his attempts to be physical present in the lives of the people he shares scenes with. Mortensen brings some emotionally honest to a film that could easily be caught up in intellectualism (despite the considerable amount of squishy gore effects and the loving depiction of abdominal surgery, this feels less figuratively visceral than many of Cronenberg's older films - another way he seems to be reflectively commenting on his own tendency towards portraying horrific body mortification), and he helps make room for the deadpan comedy laced all throughout the film, though he's almost never the source of that comedy.
It's a grounding performance for a film that needs badly to be grounded, less it just become a compendium of strange nightmare erotica: and erotic it's certainly meant to be, though I think on purpose not a version of eroticism that either us nor Cronenberg is meant to be able to recognise. Regardless, the film avoids being just a bunch of fucked-up stuff, and instead becomes a moving look at trying to find the way to make something meaningful and good from miserable inputs; that's not solely because of Mortensen's performance, but it is helped out considerably by how well the actor and the director, working together for the fourth time, are able to support each other in going to emotional territory that is in some ways completely foreign to our world, even as it fits perfectly in the world of the film. It's a complicated and strange experience, but a deeply fascinating one as well, both in itself and as a remix and restatement of ideas from throughout Cronenberg's weird and challenging career.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
It's at least somewhat disingenuous to act like he's come up with that valedictory work now. Crimes of the Future was first written at the very end of the 1990s, around the time that Cronenberg was also working on eXistenz, which came out in 1999. That film is probably the closest thing we have to a reasonable comparison in the filmmaker's canon (I can probably pin it down a bit more: it feels like eXistenZ had a baby with 1983's Videodrome, and I'm sure we can all agree what a messy conception and violent birth it must have been), sharing a visual sensibility, especially in the prop design, and a certain distinct amount of curiosity about the evolutionary possibilities of the fleshy human body, rather than the revulsion of things like Videodrome or the 1986 remake of The Fly or really most of Cronenberg's films up to and probably including 1991's Naked Lunch). Crimes of the Future indeed offers the suggestion that all the things that make body horror horrifying are perhaps better thought of as interesting, and that the violent mortification of the flesh can be a celebratory act rather than a destructive one.
That's pinning the film down to one reading, and I do think part of the great appeal of Crimes of the Future is how open-ended it is in almost every possible way. Cronenberg's filmography is rarely didactic and generally lets us find our way into the story and emotions being kicked off, but even so, this script is intensely allergic to explaining things in a neat and tidy way. And I do need to emphasise "neat and tidy", since there's also a sense in which explaining things is basically all that Crimes of the Future ever does; it just doesn't explain them in the order that would make sense if the priority was making sure the story could be easily followed and predicted in advance, and some of the things it explains are basically irrelevant. It drops us into its world rather than building it, which is to my mind a deeply satisfying way of letting the feel of this decaying, dysfunctional future rise the fore, rather than than bogging us down with the explanation of it that has very little do with that feeling.
Suffice it to say, then, that the world has born witness to a couple of extraordinary biological developments in the human race. One of them is that virtually every human being has lost the ability to feel pain, and at the same time (though perhaps not for related reasons) a susceptibility to infection. Another is that the rate of mutation in human bodies has exploded, leading to a remarkable increase in the number of new organs being formed, most of them with no apparent function. Somewhere along the way, these changes encouraged a profound shift in the relationship of humans to their bodies and the bodies of others, and society has been taken over by a new fad for performance art involving surgery and body modification. And this gets us to our main characters, two of the most important and influential of these new performance artists, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux). Saul is a rare example of a human who can still feel pain, and he's also growing new organs at a prodigious rate, and the pair have made a great success of their shows in which Caprice removes Saul's "novel organs" in front of an audience, having previously tattooed them with unique art while they were still in his body.
That's really more the set-up than the story, but the story is such a spiraling affair full of incidental details that feel important but aren't, and plot points that aren't important but get summarily tossed-off, I don't honestly know how to summarise it without just giving a transcript. The film is a grab bag of ideas, both about the way this future society functions and how we conceive of our embodied selves here and now, and it also has plenty of what I can only think of as notions, things that don't add anything but a sense of flavor and atmosphere. These include major things such as entire characters, like the erratic bureaucrats Wippet (Don McKellar, a Canadian national treasure appearing in just his second Cronenberg film - the first was eXistenZ, which hardly feels coincidental) and Timlin (Kristen Stewart, appearing in her first Cronenberg film, which feels like the most natural home she could ever have found for her most interesting instincts), who may or may not officially exist, and who keep entering Saul's life as a pair of peculiar alien forces - Timlin in particular, a pent-up fangirl turned into something throughly unnvering in Stewart's performance, maybe the best in the film and definitely the most distinctive, with her entire body seeming to twist around with awkward enthusiasm that matches the brittle choppiness of her line deliveries.
It all combines to create a clear, if not necessarily cohesive sense of a world that has broken along so many fracture lines that cohering would maybe feel like cheating anyways. The details shift along the way, but the overwhelming vibe of the movie is of an environment that's gone so far wrong that the only way to survive it is to go wrong oneself. So we have an opening sequence in which a child is smothered to death, and this somehow feels calming rather than horrifying; we have remarkable location shooting in Athens, which was selected for financial reasons but whose landscape of aging buildings inspired Cronenberg greatly, and has manifested in the completed film, under the hand of production designer Carol Spier, as a sense of wall-to-wall decay and collapse, a world whose human vitality leeched out long ago (the only visually attractive location in the whole movie is the sunlit ocean, seen only in the very first scene - no coincidence that it's the only "natural" setting we ever see). We have Howard Shore's score, one of the best he's ever provided in his long career of writing terrific music for Cronenberg films, sounding a little like electronica if electronica was for funerals instead of dance clubs; it's used with some restraint, and every time it shows up, it gives the movie a hard jolt towards feeling tetchy and uncomfortable - exactly as our protagonist spends the whole movie, so it all fits.
For all the film is about the world as a whole, it's also very particularly focused on Saul Tenser, played by Mortensen with an acute sense of who this person is and he forces himself to function, barely, in the world; he genuinely acts sick and in pain, wearing his character's peculiar costume (a black clock, black clothing, and a black mask, leaving just his gaunt eyes) as if it was both a comforting protection and also a heavy imposition, and speaking with an intermittent gurgle. Given the film's arc of find ways of being comfortable in a world pointedly driven to create disease in it its most pedantically literal sense, dis-ease, it's crucial that Saul comes across as profoundly uncomfortable in his skin, in the freakish organic beds and chairs the movie demonstrates for him, in his attempts to be physical present in the lives of the people he shares scenes with. Mortensen brings some emotionally honest to a film that could easily be caught up in intellectualism (despite the considerable amount of squishy gore effects and the loving depiction of abdominal surgery, this feels less figuratively visceral than many of Cronenberg's older films - another way he seems to be reflectively commenting on his own tendency towards portraying horrific body mortification), and he helps make room for the deadpan comedy laced all throughout the film, though he's almost never the source of that comedy.
It's a grounding performance for a film that needs badly to be grounded, less it just become a compendium of strange nightmare erotica: and erotic it's certainly meant to be, though I think on purpose not a version of eroticism that either us nor Cronenberg is meant to be able to recognise. Regardless, the film avoids being just a bunch of fucked-up stuff, and instead becomes a moving look at trying to find the way to make something meaningful and good from miserable inputs; that's not solely because of Mortensen's performance, but it is helped out considerably by how well the actor and the director, working together for the fourth time, are able to support each other in going to emotional territory that is in some ways completely foreign to our world, even as it fits perfectly in the world of the film. It's a complicated and strange experience, but a deeply fascinating one as well, both in itself and as a remix and restatement of ideas from throughout Cronenberg's weird and challenging career.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
