Crimes of the Future Movie Review

Crimes of the Future (2022)

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Written by: David Cronenberg
Directed by: David Cronenberg
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman
Rated: R
Watch the trailer

Plot
Humans adapt to a synthetic environment, with new transformations and mutations. With his partner Caprice, Saul Tenser, celebrity performance artist, publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances.

Verdict
It's not a bad movie, but it isn't easily digested. The movie's preoccupation with body horror and body manipulation overshadows the plot about a an evolution for the human species. We follow a performance artist who finds himself between two opposing forces, a group that wants to expose the evolution and a group that wants to hide it. It would be easy to describe this movie as a bunch of body horror without much of a plot despite the fact it has an interesting plot that the movie itself mostly ignores.
Skip it.

Review
This shares a name with Cronenberg's 1970 movie, but they are unrelated.

The premise is certainly wild and in the first couple of scenes there is a kid eating a plastic trash can. From the start this movie is just weird. This is a world where humans have evolved to the point that they don't feel pain and don't get infections. This means people perform surgery with reckless abandon. People cut themselves as a sort of performance art.

Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux play Saul Tenser, Caprice

Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortenson) is a performance artist that has organs removed from his body by his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) as his body continually produces new organs. We see this happen with Saul in an autopsy machine, and it is unsettling. All of the bio-mechanical machines in the movie are strange looking as they have a strange alien organic design to them.

This movie presents ideas about entertainment and intimacy. Human bodies are changing and with it entertainment. One character states that surgery is the new sex. These surgeries are presented as art, but if it is the new sex, this entertainment is pornography.
Without the potential harm that surgery harbors, cutting into someone and poking around in their organs is the most intimate thing you can do. The movie certainly has a preoccupation with the horrifying aspects of that. What is art, how far can it go, and what is intimacy in this new world? How does that intertwine with art? People crave more provocative entertainment and that leads us to this world. This is crossing a line with art, love, and pain.

Kristen Stewart, Léa Seydoux play Timlin, Caprice

There's a semblance of a plot here, but this movie is here to be weird. I really have to imagine the plot was added after the premise as it's precluded by the body horror we see throughout. Very little time is devoted to setting up the plot or even explaining the opposing factions.
The evolution of our species is on the horizon. This is a world where humans will consume the synthetic materials we as a planet create. I really like that idea, but that's almost a throwaway to a movie that wants to gross you out for most of the runtime.