One thing that you can be certain about regarding Canada's very own "Baron of Blood," "King of Venereal Horror" David Cronenberg, is that you cannot really be certain of anything about him or his work. And that is one of the greatest things about him - he always keeps you guessing.
Cronenberg, who just turned 80 this past Wednesday (March 15), has had a long-standing career as one of the most controversial and respected (by other filmmakers as distinguished as Martin Scorsese) cinematic auteurs that we've seen over the past 50-odd years. His films are also not easily categorized; he started out making blood-soaked, gross-out special effects-driven horror features ("Shivers," "Rabid," "The Brood," "The Dead Zone"), science fiction ("Scanners," "Videodrome," his masterpiece "The Fly," "eXistenZ"), psychological thrillers ("Dead Ringers," "Naked Lunch," "Spider," "A Dangerous Method"), gangster pictures ("A History of Violence," "Eastern Promises"), pure eroticism ("Crash"), and even black comedy ("Maps to the Stars").
The one principal theme running throughout much of Cronenberg's work (even his more "mainstream" efforts) is the transformation and destruction, and even the evolution (more on this in a bit), of the human body (and later the mind) through medicine, disease, science, or technology - a.k.a., "body horror," which Cronenberg is often considered to be a major innovator of - and often realized through extreme carnage and gore, and graphic & explicit depictions of sexuality. (These latter traits have been the source of much derision and controversy with his work over the years.)
This brings us to his latest, 2022's "Crimes of the Future," which is unrelated to his own earlier 1970 film of the same title. "Crimes of the Future" is sort of a return to Cronenberg's early "body horror" works from the 1970s and 1980s, but is not really "horror" in the usual "Cronenberg sense," but is more science fiction - science fiction that easily riffs on some of Cronenberg's past themes about the evolution and transformation of the human body (Cronenberg is a staunch Darwinist and devout atheist, despite being descended from Lithuanian Jews).
Set at an unspecified time in the future, significant advances in biotechnology have led to the invention of machines that directly interact with and control bodily functions (i.e., bio-mechanical chairs that assist with the consumption and digestion of food). At the same time, certain biological changes of indeterminable origin are causing humans to evolve at an alarming rate - which has some people struggling to call those afflicted with such mutagenic conditions "human."
The murder of an eight-year-old boy by his mother is what sets the story in motion. His distraught father Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman) reaches out to the celebrity performance artist Saul Tenser (Cronenberg regular Viggo Mortensen) and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) to perform a public autopsy on his son's corpse - for reasons that are just as much political as they are personal. Saul Tenser suffers from "accelerated evolution syndrome," a condition that allows his body to randomly create new organs of no known function, and his act largely revolves around Caprice surgically removing these "neo-organs" on stage while Tenser is fully conscious (the majority of people in this future no longer experience physical pain), and surgery itself is often likened to sexual intercourse (one character even matter-of-factly states that "surgery is the new sex").
"Crimes of the Future" is the most challenging and provocative film that Cronenberg has directed in a long while - on par with his early work from the late '70s and '80s. Yet there is also a glossy mainstream aesthetic to it, with a big $27 million production budget and big-name stars who are finely attuned to the script's material - most surprisingly, perhaps, is the mousy government clinician Timlin (a perfectly cast-against-type Kristen Stewart), who is captivated by Saul Tenser's performance routine. The film is also appropriately droll, but not grim, as, in true Cronenberg fashion, the grotesque special effects, imagery and gore that take front stage, serve to highlight his underlying theme here that human evolution is not a crime, and that there are those subversive elements in this not-too-distant future society who are willing to go to extreme lengths to prove it.
Like most of David Cronenberg's work, "Crimes of the Future" is not for the taint of heart, nor is it a film that you want to watch while you're eating something. But it does show that Cronenberg can return to familiar roots while still exploring new, and troubling, thematic territory.
Now that is something that Charles Darwin would be proud of.
8/10.
Cronenberg, who just turned 80 this past Wednesday (March 15), has had a long-standing career as one of the most controversial and respected (by other filmmakers as distinguished as Martin Scorsese) cinematic auteurs that we've seen over the past 50-odd years. His films are also not easily categorized; he started out making blood-soaked, gross-out special effects-driven horror features ("Shivers," "Rabid," "The Brood," "The Dead Zone"), science fiction ("Scanners," "Videodrome," his masterpiece "The Fly," "eXistenZ"), psychological thrillers ("Dead Ringers," "Naked Lunch," "Spider," "A Dangerous Method"), gangster pictures ("A History of Violence," "Eastern Promises"), pure eroticism ("Crash"), and even black comedy ("Maps to the Stars").
The one principal theme running throughout much of Cronenberg's work (even his more "mainstream" efforts) is the transformation and destruction, and even the evolution (more on this in a bit), of the human body (and later the mind) through medicine, disease, science, or technology - a.k.a., "body horror," which Cronenberg is often considered to be a major innovator of - and often realized through extreme carnage and gore, and graphic & explicit depictions of sexuality. (These latter traits have been the source of much derision and controversy with his work over the years.)
This brings us to his latest, 2022's "Crimes of the Future," which is unrelated to his own earlier 1970 film of the same title. "Crimes of the Future" is sort of a return to Cronenberg's early "body horror" works from the 1970s and 1980s, but is not really "horror" in the usual "Cronenberg sense," but is more science fiction - science fiction that easily riffs on some of Cronenberg's past themes about the evolution and transformation of the human body (Cronenberg is a staunch Darwinist and devout atheist, despite being descended from Lithuanian Jews).
Set at an unspecified time in the future, significant advances in biotechnology have led to the invention of machines that directly interact with and control bodily functions (i.e., bio-mechanical chairs that assist with the consumption and digestion of food). At the same time, certain biological changes of indeterminable origin are causing humans to evolve at an alarming rate - which has some people struggling to call those afflicted with such mutagenic conditions "human."
The murder of an eight-year-old boy by his mother is what sets the story in motion. His distraught father Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman) reaches out to the celebrity performance artist Saul Tenser (Cronenberg regular Viggo Mortensen) and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) to perform a public autopsy on his son's corpse - for reasons that are just as much political as they are personal. Saul Tenser suffers from "accelerated evolution syndrome," a condition that allows his body to randomly create new organs of no known function, and his act largely revolves around Caprice surgically removing these "neo-organs" on stage while Tenser is fully conscious (the majority of people in this future no longer experience physical pain), and surgery itself is often likened to sexual intercourse (one character even matter-of-factly states that "surgery is the new sex").
"Crimes of the Future" is the most challenging and provocative film that Cronenberg has directed in a long while - on par with his early work from the late '70s and '80s. Yet there is also a glossy mainstream aesthetic to it, with a big $27 million production budget and big-name stars who are finely attuned to the script's material - most surprisingly, perhaps, is the mousy government clinician Timlin (a perfectly cast-against-type Kristen Stewart), who is captivated by Saul Tenser's performance routine. The film is also appropriately droll, but not grim, as, in true Cronenberg fashion, the grotesque special effects, imagery and gore that take front stage, serve to highlight his underlying theme here that human evolution is not a crime, and that there are those subversive elements in this not-too-distant future society who are willing to go to extreme lengths to prove it.
Like most of David Cronenberg's work, "Crimes of the Future" is not for the taint of heart, nor is it a film that you want to watch while you're eating something. But it does show that Cronenberg can return to familiar roots while still exploring new, and troubling, thematic territory.
Now that is something that Charles Darwin would be proud of.
8/10.