Crimes of the Future
Crimes of the Future (18)
Crimes of the Future (2022) Second Sight Films 2NDBR4192
Now available in luxury edition 4K UHD / Blu Ray box set and Standard edition 4K/UHD and standard Edition Blu Ray, David Cronenberg’s long awaited remake of his sparse, alienating 1970 sophomore film.
The once familiar clinical settings are here exchanged for a much-changed human environment, so affected and transformed by artificial intervention, that pain and disease no longer exist, although you wouldn’t know it from the downward spiral of grime, poverty and desperation here.
There are some who are now eating synthetic food, their chewing and digestion helped along by the still-human ones operating body active chairs that tense their muscles for them to aid chewing. Even the human body itself has started to d/evolve with new, extra organs brought into being as part of the cycle of renewal through scientific means. Any such new appendages need to be declared, surgically tattooed and closely monitored at the Centre for Natural Organ Registry, a shabby office bureau with poorly paid, disinterested staff.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of life in this macabre future is the elevation of autopsy into performance art, as people pay to watch a stylized medical operation with bone-like instruments to a soundtrack of punishing industrial music. Later, a man with more ears than are generally considered necessary dances to atrocious disco music. Imagine how he hears it.
The autopsy footage and surgical instruments workshop are both shown in classic Cronenberg vignettes, with an obsessive interest in the form of these gruesome objects and the uses they are put to. The eating of plastics and other artificial foods is a true innovation, with nothing of the comical about it. The desire to perform for others seems to cut across all classes, and ‘just to feel something’ is a phrase that comes to mind.
Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), getting cold feet about taking part in a bizarre beauty pageant, is intrigued by Timlin (Kristen Stewart) of the Organ Registry, who seems to want to be part of his show. Tenser and partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux) go to see the mysterious Lang, (Scott Speedman) a radical evolutionist, who is hell-bent on making an art statement. His prop will be a boy’s dead body, stored in his chest freezer. We learn that the boy was the first one born with a digestive system that could cope with plastics, murdered by his mother for being ‘inhuman’. The boy’s autopsy reveals he has tattooed organs, long before it was required by law.
The shocks in ‘Crimes of the Future’ come frequently, but are more cerebral than visual, and the general feeling of alienation between the characters and in this hostile bureaucracy is well realized, but the film’s grim view of the future makes for a depressing viewing experience, rather than the stimulating one we have come to expect from this director.
Scenester
29/8/23
