It’s never made precisely clear how far in the future the titular crimes are occurring, but a lot of signs in Crimes of the Future point toward a gloriously achievable next phase of human existence. “Inspirational” and “encouraging” are not words one usually associates with Canada’s own prophet of the flesh, David Cronenberg, but the surprises he has in store for adventurous viewers and shell-shocked earthlings alike are unprecedented. Climate crisis is apparent but not explicitly addressed, the dominance of microplastics in the human biome is very present, and technology doesn’t seem to be actively leading to any sort of development, but rather human ingenuity is finding new purposes in abandoned methods and models.
As a species, human beings have evolved beyond pain. That one narrative point lets the mind run wild with the delirious possibilities of pharmaceutical conglomerates brought to heel (as well as corrupt politicians hung out to dry after profiting off of human misery for so very long), the grinding burr of fear robbed of much of its power, and antiquated views on bodily morality (and those who traffic in them) having died out. In 2012’s Cosmopolis, Cronenberg directs Samantha Morton in an exceptional sequence in which, as Vija Kinsky, the “head of theory” in the employ of Robert Pattinson’s renegade billionaire, she addresses the unspoken hinge of all futurism — the mass deaths that must occur between the now and the future. But what Crimes of the Future supposes — and this is in keeping with a current in Cronenberg’s films for almost 50 years now — is that innovation and evolution are happening on the streets all around us, with perceived elites being left behind to drown in their own status quo.
Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) is an artist, undercover agent and the very site of evolutionary derangement, and he’s finding a way to channel his own mutation into a variant of fame quite unlike anything we would recognize as such. The art gatherings we witness seem like kinky fun (surely this is what a party at Orlan’s house is like) as well as genuinely transgressive — if they were happening in Old Nashville, they would doubtlessly have gone down at the old Shirley Street Station.
Saul and his partner/lover Caprice (Léa Seydoux) are a new Christo and Jeanne-Claude or Pierre et Gilles; his body grows new organs, she removes them in an act that blends surgery, performance, and grade-school grossout. At the center of their work is the Sark Control System, an antiquated device for performing autopsies repurposed into something unexpected. Its name is a tribute to Tron, but its function is of a piece with the legendary space-bortion medpod from Prometheus. And it even comes with a repair duo wielding power drills and healthy sexuality, Rotter and Berst, steeped in “Wendy? Yes, Lisa” energy and Breekon and Hope focus. These women have expertise and menace, and are top-notch technicians and murderers. They are Pride Month icons with spinoff potential.
Nobody does the factional (and counterfactional) nature of social movements and secret organizations quite like David Cronenberg. There are heaps of different organizations in play around Tenser’s newest performance piece, and as always it wouldn’t hurt to have some graphing paper handy to keep track of where allegiances lie and who’s working for what ideological purpose. Timlin is the civil servant/art groupie embodied by Kristen Stewart in a performance so exciting it is best spoken of in the company of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Allegra Geller in eXistenZ and Deborah Kara Unger as Catherine Ballard in Crash. Timlin is a cipher for the modern world’s abandonment of specialization. She must be all things because no one gets enough time to just focus on being or doing one thing. Similarly, Crimes of the Future isn’t just an innovative sci-fi allegory or plausible next step — it also has to be scandalous, inventive and an unexpected comeback for Cronenberg.
Though it has been eight years since his last feature film, it is deeply unfair to call Crimes of the Future a comeback; David Cronenberg never left modern society. As a culture, we may thank the “Flesh and Blood” season of Slasher and Star Trek: Discovery for reminding executives at various media companies that we have one of the greatest minds in sci-fi and horror ready to go at a moment’s notice — in this case shooting in an Athens, Greece, that seems timeless, set aside from the tangles of what we persist in claiming as The Usual, both in terms of the chaos imagery already there and the effects of long-term austerity on public spaces. This is a shockingly optimistic film, one that implies that the Luddite reticence that reactionary religious types hold will condemn them to extinction, and that only those willing to embrace transformation can hope to survive. Its final image is a breathtaking promise, both benediction and psychosexual cliffhanger, and Crimes of the Future is a masterpiece of infiltration on both the micro (as in cellular) and macro (as in factional) levels. And as an idea, it has already infected the viewer before the digital projector cycles down.
