I never quite understood what I was supposed to be getting from this movie, except that in the future, mutants wander around, cutting off their own newly evolved organs for paying audiences, eating plastic, mumbling softly and gravelly-throated, and looking as if they smell strangely and draw flies.
Crimes of the Future, the 2022 film titled by director david Cronenberg after his 1970 or thereabouts avant garde film, which is virtually unrelated to this film, save perhaps for the fact that the original film does mention in the narration some “special adaptation” experienced by humans undergoing some evolutional shift due to…experimental cosmetics.
The entire cosmetics line is dropped here in favor of a future wherein human beings are evolving new organs and adapting to dine on plastic. You read that last right.
The future is not exactly “cyberpunk” here–no A.I.’s seemingly, except for the biomechanical monstrosity’s humans interface with because of their steadily weird panoply of organic growths. And, we think, perhaps this is all caused by radiation exposure. Or perhaps, too much aspartame.
Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) wanders around like a street samurai in a hooded jacket coat thing, gravelly-throated and whispery hoarse, speaking with people that are some sort of post-evolutionary adaptational anarchist revolutionary underground cadre (I know, a mouthful)–and this is after the little boy on the beach staring at the sea (wherein we know human life emerged billions of years ago as a one-celled creature yearning to grow legs, go to the trees, and build Quik-E-Marts on Mars) is murdered by his mother for having a bit of a nosh on his waste paper basket.
Elective surgery in the mutant future: Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux in CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022)
So, there’s this recurring urban legend of a millionaire performance artist (aren’t those two things mutually exclusive; I mean, unless you’re Maria Abramovic?) who designed a “self-surgery” table wherein he exhibited himself having literal body parts lopped off. Or some such. (This is covered int he original incendiary and lightning bolt-like revelatory underground Gospel of Unreason, the late Adam Parfrey’s seminal anthology Apocalypse Culture (1988), where it shares space in the article “Art in the Dark” with accounts of artists who climbed electrical poles and hid out in galleries as a part of “endurance art”, surviving on roach turds and Perrier water, we assume.
Getting back to it, Saul Tenser lives with his assistant Caprice (Léa Seydoux) who somewhat nurses him along with the weird, inverted, giant clamshell biomechanical cradle he sleeps in, that “anticipates his pain.” Or rather, seems to fail to do so as the movie begins.
The duo prepares or performs, and everyone wanders around, speaking softly and slowly, in a cityscape world that looks like an AI adaptation of the contents and smell of the dumpster out behind Gas America on a hot August day (one could well imagine everyone here drawing flies quite easily and natural, especially Mortensen/Tenser). The film does have the look and feel of an adapted graphic novel of a presumably high caliber of artistry–unlike Croneneberg’s quite interesting and good A History of Violence (2005), also starring his favorite actor, Viggo Mortensen
Getting back to it once more, their act consists of him removing the weird organs–which have to be, I take it, registered with the Bureau of Weird Organ Removal… I’m not sure because I was never quite sure what the hell was supposed to be going on in this damn flick. There’s a weird, whispery role played by Kristen Stewart who seems as if she’s auditioning for a “Saturday Night Live” sketch. Nearly everyone in this damn movie annoys me for some reason.
The murdered boy is exhibited at an “autopsy performance” in an autopsy table biomechanical horror device, and everyone sort of ambles around and speaks softly and then some chicks get naked but there is NOTHING appealing about it and I never really got who they were and why they got naked, and then the revolutionaries and the underground do something, and we end (Spoiler Alert!) with Tenser sitting in a biomechanical organic potty chair trying to gum some delicious gruel. The end.
Crimes of the Future is the aesthetic and cinematic equivalent of watching octogenerians strain on a nursing home toilet. If you’re thinking, “Death to Videodrome, long live the New Flesh!”, or even the surrealistic video game revolutionaries of eXistenZ (1999), think again. This plodding, mutated nightmare is as much of a flavorful mouthful as a plastic wastepaperbasket devoured by a murdered mutant by his mother.
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