The Triumph of CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

Rating: 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸 and a 🏳️‍⚧️

Not far into the freshly birthed Crimes of the Future, we witness two biotech mechanics oohing and aahing over a rare piece of soft machinery, in the collection of “body artist” Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and his performance partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux). It's an autopsy table turned surgical nest; a hulking mass of chitin and tissue known only as “the Sark.” Our young mechanics behold it with professional reverence wielded only by those who specialize in very specialized things - “they stopped making them before our time,” one remarks. “I've never seen one in the flesh.” The same could be said for Crimes itself: David Cronenberg’s paean to the throbbing body horror ooze he largely abandoned in the 1990s. For those on the wavelength - for those tuned into intermingling philosophies of bodies and identities and aesthetics, Crimes of the Future is not simply a return to form but a full-voltage revelation; an eye and mind-opening offering which proves the 76-year-old writer-director is still the best to ever do it.

To be sure, there's nothing within Crimes which is particularly novel to Cronenberg’s oeuvre. The plot, which follows the aforementioned Saul Tenser as he spontaneously sprouts new organs, removes them as public art, and interacts with various people and organizations who seek to help or hinder or him - resonates with the shadowy evolutional conspiracies of Videodrome and Scanners and the like. The biomechanics of the future are leftover nightmares from Dead Ringers or eXistenZ, the intersection of performance, sex, and violence rides a wave straight out of Crash, and even the movie itself is a second take on a 1970 project of the same name. However, it is not so much a film of “greatest hits” as it is a superb synthesis of materials Cronenberg’s been simmering his entire career - appropriate, considering Crime’s main concern appears to be reflection on a life spent opening oneself literally and metaphorically to the eyes of the public.

Admittedly, I come to praise Crimes of the Future, not to dissect it - but this is a film which invites interpretation and digestion like a zipped-open stomach cavity. Perhaps that's why I found the movie’s hypnotic, uncanny rhythm so intoxicating. What's going on here behind the often stilted, frayed-wire performances? Why, as with most of his post-2010 work, does Cronenberg choose to shoot this as if we’re viewing bugs confined by the limits of the frame? When a plot about a young boy genetically inheriting his father’s surgical procedure bubbles up, is this David commenting on his son Brandon making weirdo shit like Possessor? Possibly, and probably even; but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and by the time Crimes concludes you're just astounded and thoroughly pleased that something this strange and sick could be made and beamed directly to your local theater in the year 2022. For those who were disappointed by the true lack of gross nonsense in Titane, this is your film.

The septuagenarian Cronenberg doesn't skimp on nasty shit, and like miracles from a vivisected angel it's all fantastic to behold. The aforementioned disgusting and wondrous biomechanics, multiple dissections, a couple murders, nude lesbians, Kristen Stewart sucking Mortensen’s fingers, and yeah, the ear guy - all deftly folded into the film's thematics (as if you need a reason), and all treated with a touch of care and absurdity indicating a creator well-aware of material and tone. When Caprice sticks her tongue into Saul’s opened stomach, as she inevitably must to complete the film’s equation of surgery to intimacy, Mortensen grumbles “don't spill it,” and I was the only one in a packed theater who cackled out loud. Come on y’all. I feel blessed that not only does this film exist, but that it's often truly, completely funny as it is.

I feel blessed too (utterly, totally, blissfully) that Crimes of the Future picks up Cronenberg’s tendency of making films extremely synonymous to the transgender experience. It’s true such interpreted thematics come part-and-parcel to a filmmaker obsessed with bodies and identity - there’s the post-human psychic underground of Scanners, Videodrome’s new flesh, and of course, The Fly’s beautiful and grotesque resonance to the second puberty of an MTF (male-to-fly) transition. However, Crimes of the Future feels so irrevocably and specifically mapped to the societal and psychological push-and-pull of existing in the transgender sphere, what your flesh means and how you interact with the world and how people in the world interact with you, that it's almost unbelievable it wasn't intentional. Perhaps, in some way, it is - after all, what is a trans person but a body artist; one who alters their physical meat as a form of innermost expression?

I suspect, as with last year’s fantastic Matrix Resurrections, the gender spectrum will be what divides those who appreciate Crimes of the Future and those who love it unreservedly. To spell out the trans reading of Crimes feels facile and unfair to a truly special cinematic work, but suffice to say the movie about a government trying to erase and deem those who embrace the complexities of their identity as “anti-human” hits fairly hard. The ending, one of the most beautiful scenes Cronenberg has ever crafted, will slice through anyone who’s ever felt the pain of existing in a body they can't understand (and the overwhelming bliss which follows eventual self-acceptance) like a surgical knife. In those final moments I saw not Viggo Mortensen on the screen but myself, reliving a hundred, a thousand, a hundred-thousand moments of agony and struggle against myself and the world, and the single, pinpoint lightning bolt of revelation which carried peace of incalculable magnitude. There will not be a better film released this year.