Nightmare imagery and sickening body horror are hallmarks of notorious genre director David Cronenberg. Unforgettable are his works like The Fly or Videodrome, in which the Canadian thinks intelligently about the relationship between man and technology in addition to disturbing abysses.
Cronenberg returned to cinemas in 2022 with Crimes of the Future, his first feature film since 2014’s Maps to the Stars. If you haven’t seen the fantastic work that caused a scandal ahead of its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, you can Stream Crimes of the Future now with an Amazon Prime subscription. *
Crimes of the Future celebrates the post-apocalypse with bizarre bodies and surgical sex
In his latest film, Cronenberg paints a picture of a decayed, post-apocalyptic future. Here people can hardly feel feelings like pain, although for some uncontrolled new organs grow in the body.
The plot of Crimes of the Future revolves mainly around Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), who has developed a kind of performance art show from these superfluous organs with his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux). At each of their performances, they are watched by the National Organ Registry as a mysterious plastic-feeding group usher in the next level of humanity want.
Sounds like a pure David Cronenberg film, but it’s nowhere near as shocking or provocative as it was made out to be. Before the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, the director himself said in an interview that he was sure that people from the audience would leave the hall within the first five minutes.
Behind the scandal is a smart sci-fi film about life after the horror
Suddenly, Crimes of the Future was jazzed up into scandalous hype intended to disgust audiences and have the potential for panic attacks. Even if the sci-fi horror grotesque bodies, lustful surgeries and bizarre acts almost elegantly portrayed, it is at the same time a very quiet, reduced film with a very high proportion of dialogue.
While Cronenberg has always been about acknowledging chilling deformities and alien growths as exciting new potential, Crimes of the Future is now an apt post-body horror film.
world cinema
Crimes of the Future
Having gone through all the possibilities of transformations, the director now thinks about how amidst all the nightmare images and bizarre impulses new human existence can arise. At the very end, Cronenberg finds a consoling conclusion.
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