‘Crimes of the Future’ Review: David Cronenberg’s shaky sci-fi homecoming
Back in the 1980s, the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg was forging his very own type of cinema, with his otherworldly body horror flicks like Videodrome and The Fly, reflecting on the fragility of the human condition whilst thrilling audiences with oozing gunk and pliable flesh. His latest project, Crimes of the Future, which trivially shares its name with his very first feature film, strives for the greatness of his past success but can only muster a scent of what made such 20th-century classics so great.
Suffusing his old body horror antics in with his new style of ethereal dramatic storytelling, as seen in 2012s Cosmopolis and his Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars in 2014, Crimes of the Future clumsily slaps both styles together to make a film that feels disjointed, half-baked and unrealised. For such a master filmmaker, Cronenberg’s latest is a frustratingly thin essay that offers little intrigue to fuel its fire.
Reuniting with Viggo Mortensen after having worked with him on A Dangerous Method 11 years earlier, Cronenberg picks the American actor to lead his apathetic sci-fi set in a dystopian future where humans have adapted to a synthetic environment in which bodies can be mutated at will. Saul (Mortensen), together with his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux), are performance artists who showcase the metamorphosis of new organs in peculiar performances carried out in vast skeletal cocoons.
Though, much like the nature of all entertainment, the artist seeks endless innovation, with the ultimate performance of Saul and Caprice leading them to a prickly moral dilemma. Strangely though, whilst Cronenberg sets up this moral quandary, the drama for such a conversation to play out is never realised because the whole film is set within a world that has become apathetic to seemingly all emotion.
Such is the crux of the issue with Cronenberg’s latest, it is devoid of the heart that it dearly needs to keep the viewer engaged with its challenging, often discriminating, narrative direction. Where the Canadian creative has previously shown his ability to construct tangible sci-fi worlds, a significant lack of effort is taken with Crimes of the Future to strap audiences into this story of artificial organs, alien operating tables and amateur surgeons.
Whilst the concept is innately ‘Cronenberg’, it feels as if the director isn’t truly able to capture the entire scope of his imagination, with the ultimate film failing to live up to the exciting promise of its potential.
As it is, Crimes of the Future is an exploration of a marvellous concept that seems to barely get started. There are several moments of genuine surprise, wonder and cinematic beauty, but it isn’t enough to seize one’s attention for over 90 minutes, despite the efforts of the lead cast who are evidently doing all they can on what is regrettably a thinly-written script.
Of all the performances, it is Kristen Stewart as the peculiar wiry surgeon Timlin who steals much of the limelight, perfectly jelling her identity in with the fabric of Cronenberg’s curious film, to the extent where she feels like an organic limb of the story. She is the saving grace of an anticipated release that sadly lacks charm and true surprise, feeling like an echo of Cronenberg’s true potential.
