Director: David Cronenberg
Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux, Scott Speedman, Kristen Stewart
Year: 2022
You know those every-once-in-a-while movies that either hit you dead on and you love them or they miss you by a mile and you hate their guts? Yeah, that’s Crimes of the Future, a film that you will either adore as genius or curse for ever being conceived. Unfortunately for me, I was on the hating end, and I can’t recall off the top of my head a movie that I’ve just simply abhorred more, from start to finish, from moral to means.
Some time in the future, humans will evolve in surprising way. We don’t feel pain, we don’t get infections, and so surgery becomes the new sex, mutilating ourselves for pleasure, glamour, art, love. It’s a weird existence, made weirder by the evolving of foreign organs, like we are changing into something other than man, something more than necessary. For two performance artists, this has opened new avenues; for others, this is the end of real life.
I don’t know how to explain how much I detested this movie; it was almost physical, how much I wished they had never thought of it. Cronenberg is hard to enjoy anyway, he’s very experimental, which is great, but honestly he’s never hit me quite right, so if you’re already a fan you may have an easier time with Crimes of the Future. I just don’t want it, I want nothing to do with it, and I think it literally set cinema back a few years and taste levels. It’s like Naked Lunch (bad) but with Brazil (good) mixed in, until the absurdity turns a weird corner to a place we weren’t supposed to be. I guess Viggo was good, I liked his character, but the rest of the film was worthless, and ultimately really gross, really dumb, and very bad.
My rating: ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆