Trailer for new Cronenberg movie Crimes of the Future (2022)

It's weird to see a trailer for a movie that looks interesting. I almost don't know how to react. When was the last time something looked like something you haven't seen before?

So apparently it's not a remake of that one hour movie he made in 1970. It only has the same title, that's all.

Free publicity!

People should really know what tropes to expect from a Cronenberg film, things being removed from orifices. It's hardly new.

Has anyone else seen this yet? I went last night. It's at the end of its run at my local theater, but there was a decent showing in the audience still... although I can't imagine it's made much in theaters. It's a very strange film with a very limited appeal.

It's got a lot of the old Cronenberg stuff of course (he wrote this about 20 years ago), but it's very strange narratively as well. It posits a nondescript future in which humans have evolved to no longer feel pain, not be susceptible to infection, some who have the ability to digest plastics, and some who grow what seem to be superfluous organs. Viggo Mortensen is one of these people who grows these organs and he and his partner Lea Seydoux remove them in front of audiences as performance art.

There are multiple subplots, some of which are very relevant, and one that doesn't seem to make much sense; and a lot of dialogue ruminating on art, evolution, surgery, etc. The line that Kristen Stewart has about 'surgery is the new sex' seems to be a lot of what this is about and also the metaphor of the artist opening up and being vulnerable is made very, very literal.

But it's kinda strange that with such big and grand ideas it's a very small and contained film. The whole thing plays in a few small locations in old dilapidated buildings with no art on the walls and stains and rust and peeling paint and crumbling stone everywhere. This is clearly an intentional design choice, but it also feels like its a very mysterious if not unconsidered what the rest of this world looks like or how it functions. We only ever see a handful of people in an unnamed city. There are references to other people elsewhere, like a cop who works for the 'New Vice' unit and a pair who work for the 'National Organ Registry,' both of which suggest a larger society and government, but we stay with just these few people grappling with these huge ideas.

There's a lot to read into in today's world in this script, like the notion of people performing their own medicine home (Lea Seydoux used to be a doctor but actual doctors may be obsolete now), the idea of body modification can be seen as having to do with cosmetic surgery or gender surgery, and ingesting plastics is obviously highly relevant today (evidently this is one of the reasons Cronenberg pursued this script again after 2 decades); but it's also interesting that a lot of this is presented seemingly without judgment. He shows us that there are factions of people that are adamantly against these new steps in evolution, and those that want to embrace them, but I don't feel like he favors either. This is a presentation of this new reality in this version of the future and he tries to show it without taking much of a stance in either direction, but just presenting the conflict as a fact.

All in all, it's an interesting, and odd film. The kind you'd expect from Cronenberg delving back into body horror... although you could argue about whether there's much horror involved and whether the body stuff is meant to horrify at all... not that I want to have that argument ever.

If there's one major issue I have it's that it seems to end after the 2nd act. The ending seems to set up a really interesting 3rd act that never comes and the revelation at the end is not much a surprise. There are great and provocative ideas, but I don't know that they payoff with the same level of interest in which they were set up. Now maybe he wanted to preserve the idea of non-judgment and this imaginary 3rd act that I think was suggested might destroy that, but I think that it's a weaker total film for it. I think the next part of this story really could have been fascinating...Also some of the CGI isn't great, but there's not much of it.