In the future, surgery is the new sex.
But is it also a crime?
Every now and then I debate what this blog should be about.
I try to dabble in multiple genres and get out of Hollywood/American cinema.
The older I get I also feel more conscious of areas of film knowledge and theory that I am ignorant of.
But then there are cases like Crimes of the Future, where I feel like my prior knowledge is an impediment.
David Cronenberg is a filmmaker I was obsessed with years before I saw anything he made.
As a teen, I read books, interviews and plot summaries.
This meant when I watched his movies I did not feel like I could write anything about them - on the one hand, they were not surprising to watch.
On the other hand I was always second-guessing my thoughts about them - was I just regurgitating bits of critical analysis I read when I was 16?
I was also conscious that I had not watched a lot of Cronenberg’s movies - I have not seen anything he’s made since the 1980s.
I tried to catch up beforehand but life got in the way.
Maybe it was good that I was familiar with Cronenberg’s early work because this film feels like a return.
Albeit this is the most hopeful version of Cronenberg’s particular brand of horror.
What is fascinating about Cronenberg’s work is his obsession with bodily transformation - and the filmmaker’s position is not based on a moral binary.
To Cronenberg, bodily transformation is not inherently horrific.
It is merely another form of existence. The humans in this future have begun to lose their sense of pain and grow new organs with unknown functions.
The conflict in Crimes is that these transformations - particularly the creation of new organs - are the ultimate taboo and illegal.
There is a branch of law enforcement dedicated to registering and eliminating them.
What is also similar to Cronenberg’s early work is the script (which he wrote solo) which Carrie’s over certain traits: It is overly didactic, and features a lot of exposition through dialogue.
It also features Cronenberg’s trademark of offbeat character names: Timlin, Wippet, and Saul Tenser.
The movie does feel overly didactic at points, and I found some of the character interactions and decision-making a little hard to follow.
While it goes heavy on the exposition, it does not go too far into world-building.
I loved the bric-a-brac of the backgrounds - the rundown buildings, spare interiors and dead, half-sunken ships dotting the shoreline.
Instead of going into a crowded mode-en-scene, the filmmakers have taken elements away. This creates a sense of loneliness and desolation.
This is a world that is lived in but dying (or at least appears to be).
There are also some great audiovisual moments which carry over the film’s themes without dialogue - the first performance piece manages to convey a sense of the eroticism and rapture of the performers and the audience.
The one real detriment is the use of CGI in the surgery scenes - it is noticeably poor in rendering and detracts from the film’s focus on the flesh
The biggest change from Cronenberg’s early work is the performances.
Mortensen is a worn-down, deadpan centre.
I found Seydoux hard to read - she is as enamoured with the surgery as Mortensen’s Saul, but she seems to yearn for more.
She earnestly believes in their art - a love defined when she rejects the idea of performing an autopsy because there will be no consent.
I liked it but I wonder if it is working the way the filmmakers want.
Kristen Stewart delivers a highly mannered performance which manages to be the funniest character in the film.
It feels like she is trying to repress an orgasm in every scene.
Stewart is the most obvious example but the movie is funny.
Crimes of the Future may be a little slow and clunky, but it has a wonderfully deadpan sense of humour.
Even as the characters’ art might come off abject to our eyes, it is treated as matter-of-fact by the characters.
My mind is abuzz after this movie, but I am keen to watch more of Cronenberg’s work from across his filmography. Watching Crimes - and its parallels with his early work - made me feel like I had only touched the bread on a sandwich I needed to bite into.
The biggest takeaway from the movie is a sense of hope.
Instead of a dying world, we have been watching a snake shedding its skin.
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