Crimes Of The Future (2022) ****
What a delight, after three collaborations with David Cronenberg (the previous one eleven years ago!), to finally have Viggo Mortensen star in one of the director's "body horror" films. After Maps To The Stars, Cronenberg's most recent feature film, a full eight years ago (one of my least favorite by the director but still a good film), I wasn't sure what to expect with Crimes Of The Future (2022). I'm overjoyed to report that I loved it. Viggo, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart all contribute strong performances, the cinematography is striking and moody, and Howard Shore delivers another unusual, stellar score (the main theme of which, over the title and end credits, reminded me a bit of 2019's Uncut Gems (review)).
COTF is a brilliant companion piece—with a natural extension of themes DC has been mining his whole career—to Videodrome (1983) (review), eXistenZ (1999), Dead Ringers (1988), Crash (1996) (review), and The Brood (1979) (review). The exploitation factor and gross exploration of human anatomy so prevalent in DC's movies is certainly there. But it's also a talky, arty picture that calls to mind other works by him, such as Naked Lunch (1991) (review), Cosmopolis (2012) (review), and Eastern Promises (2007) (review), particularly in the case of the latter when it comes to one plot point, which I won't spoil.
There's a lot of ideas and topics crammed into COTF—art, performance, politics, authority, autonomy, pain, pleasure, surgery, sex, self-mutilation, evolution, digestion. But the film stretches out rather languidly and manages to have cohesion. Like the best of Cronenberg's work, it opens up plenty of questions, but doesn't attempt to solve anything, rather presenting the opportunity for dialogue and offering an ambiguous ending, which might irk some viewers but which I personally found perfect.
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