Film Review - Crimes of the Future
Images courtesy of Madman Entertainment.
Having been a David Cronenberg fanatic ever since seeing his fantastic Jeff Goldblum-starring remake of The Fly at a relatively young age, the past 17 years of his filmography have been a bit of a dry spot for me. Not in the sense that I've felt they were bad films, but rather, I simply never made time to watch them because they seem so detached from his usual gloopy body horror that I'd fallen in love with. Even 2002's Spider, a film that I remember enjoying, I can recall watching and feeling a bit miffed upon discovering it didn't actually involve the titular arachnid (let's just say teenage me was a bit more prone to being a victim of my own expectations).
It was with great excitement and anticipation, then, that news of Crimes of the Future arrived - a return to sci-fi/body horror, reworked from an old project that at one point had Nicolas Cage as first option to play the lead role (I seriously want to see the reality where that happened), bearing the same title as Cronenberg’s second ever feature film. In a future where food seems to be running short due to decades of microplastic infiltration, the government seeks to hold the reins on humanity as a phenomena known as “accelerated evolution syndrome” runs rampant, and underground performance artists seek to show off their new vestigial organs in grotesque warehouse shows that really put the body in electronic body music. Cronenberg is a director who's always seemed drawn to the cross-section of science and sex, the clinical and the intimate, using flesh as an instrument - and Crimes is perhaps the most emblematic of this exploration. Pain is gone. Surgery is the new sex. Body is reality.
Through the eyes of performance artists Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux), we explore a world ripe with potential allegorical interpretations. The parallels between this new performance art and the current state of Hollywood filmmaking are clear: Tenser refers to a character known only as Earman as "escapist propaganda for the masses". Another that stands out is the government's need for control over bodies and society's obsession with beauty standards, Instagram-approved cosmetic surgery compared with body modifications such as tattoos, piercings and scarification - the notion of what is considered "acceptable" practice of one's bodily autonomy and what constitutes the manipulation of flesh as an act of rebellion.
That's not to say all this is done with an air of pretentiousness, where you have to be "in" on the messaging to be having a good time. No, instead Cronenberg is having about as much fun as one could have with this kind of material, injecting it with gleefully dry oddball humour, while still somehow showing restraint and class - ensuring that Crimes of the Future winds up feeling like a symphonic marriage of his latter and earlier filmmaking styles.
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Crimes of the Future is screening exclusively at Cinema Nova from Thursday, the 25th of August. For tickets and more info, click here.