David Cronenberg’s return to “body horror,” a genre he invented, after two decades of comparatively conventional, though by no means less disturbing, dramas has the same title as one of his earliest movies, so at first I wondered if he was remaking it. Though I haven’t seen that earlier movie, this apparently is nothing like it, so I have to assume he just likes the title and, perhaps, felt he wasted it on the other one. “Crimes” in this case are not necessarily the legal type, but rather the existential type. Taking place sometime in the future, the story centers on the idea of something called accelerated evolution syndrome, a biological condition in which humans develop new organs and systems to cope with the environmental degradation they’ve visited upon the natural world. In the opening scene, a depressed looking boy devours a trash can full of plastic, after which his mother kills him. Later, the boy’s father, an “anarchist” named Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), uses his son’s body in an attempt to show the world what humans have done to it. 

He accomplishes this by offering the corpse to a pair of performance artists, Saul (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Lea Seydoux), whose mode of artistic expression is surgery. Saul has a knack for producing “novel organs,” which Caprice removes from him for paying audiences. Dotrice offers his son for an autopsy, presumably to see what makes his digestive tract receptive to polyethylene. But before this happens, the viewer is subjected to Cronenberg’s patented gruesome visual style, which has to contend with an over-complicated plot and characters whose purpose often seem at odds with the logic of that plot. The “performance” scenes are the most compelling, and not just because they’re gross, but rather due to Cronenberg’s insistence that such actions can be considered art. Saul, as it were, suffers for that art in more ways than one. The surgery is painless because Saul, as well as most humans, has evolved away from pain, but he suffers from countless maladies that require creative solutions, including bizarrely designed furniture that eases Saul’s unique forms of physical inconvenience. In this regard, Crimes of the Future improves thematically on that earlier, more controversial Cronenberg film, Crash, in that sex has no appeal unless it is tethered to something more visceral, in this case scalpels cutting into flesh. 

But where there’s art there has to be politics, and the introduction of something called the National Organ Registry confuses matters with its determination, through the agency of two factotums (Don McKellar, Kristen Stewart), to monitor Saul’s performances. This subplot has a direct connection to the one in which Dotrice seems to be concocting an aesthetic revolution, the idea being that humanity has adapted to a befouled biosphere much too readily and needs some sort of comeuppance, but the two bureaucrats often come off as hastily conceived comic relief (Stewart’s character is clearly turned on by the surgeries), thus blunting whatever message they are meant to deliver. Cronenberg’s ideas about evolution and adaptation are intriguing enough by themselves without all the subtext, but what is a Cronenberg movie without subtext? It’s simply a horror movie like no other. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Crimes of the Future home page in Japanese

photo (c) Serendipity Point Films 2021