Gore-fest meets snooze-fest: Crimes of the Future reviewed

You always have to brace yourself for the latest David Cronenberg film, but with Crimes of the Future it’s not the scalpels slicing into flesh or the mutant dancer with sewn-up eyes (and mouth) or even the filicide (oh, boy) you have to brace yourself for. In this instance, the most shocking thing is that it’s so muddled and dreary. It’s a gore-fest, true enough, but it’s a gore-fest that is mostly a snooze-fest. That’s what you need to brace yourself for.

I first became acquainted with Cronenberg when, as a young teenager, I bunked off to see Shivers (1975) and while every film since (The Fly, Crash, Eastern Promises, History of Violence) has proved difficult, as I am squeamish, I always felt I’d left the cinema with something and had been in the presence of a master filmmaker. But here, when it was over, I felt nothing but relief. Thank God that’s done, is all I thought.

This is set at some unspecified time in the future in a world that’s a peeling, rotting wasteland. It opens with an eight-year-old boy playing on a rocky beach with a half-sunk rusty tanker in the distance. Later that night we see him brushing his teeth, then crouching under the bathroom sink to eat a plastic wastepaper basket, biting into it as if it were an apple, while producing white, glue-ish spit. It is super-creepy and his mother is so alarmed that once he’s in bed she smothers him with a pillow. Filicide. Always a nice way to kick off proceedings. And then it’s all downhill from here.

Our attention switches to Viggo Mortensen as Saul, a man who sleeps in a bed that looks like a giant pulsating beetle and who keeps growing internal organs he doesn’t need. This is known as ‘Accelerated Evolution Syndrome’, which is somehow a response to a world now riddled with synthetic chemicals, although why this is happening to Saul, and no one else, is never explained, just as so much is never explained. Why would the body evolve to produce superfluous organs? Can we even call that evolution? He has a doting partner, Caprice (Léa Seydoux), and together they are performance artists with a show that involves her surgically removing his new, redundant adrenal gland, say, and tattooing it. They are famous and beloved by audiences because…I don’t know. Maybe there’s no telly in the unspecified future? Elsewhere, there’s a pair of government agents (Kristen Stewart, Don McKellar) tracking these new organs while a detective (Welket Bungué) is investigating something or other. The dead boy’s father (Scott Speedman) also comes into play while harbouring his own agenda.

There are scalpels to flesh and there is plenty of blood, some of which Seydoux has to lick up, ecstatically, but as there is no one to care about and there’s a cold heartlessness at play you could say it’s bloodless. All the characters whisper in epigrams that make no sense. Kristen Stewart’s character whispers that ‘surgery is the new sex’ but how? Why? Before an autopsy on the dead boy, one character whispers: ‘What will we find in there?’ ‘Outer space,’ is the (whispered) reply. The narrative never properly goes anywhere. One scene doesn’t necessarily follow another. So there’s no tension or suspense, and to top it all Saul has a staccato cough and does so much throat clearing it’s irritating beyond belief.

This has received some rave reviews elsewhere, just so you know. But I couldn’t make head nor tail of it, and it’s so deadly earnest and dark it’s like wading through a depression but less fun. Usually, if I’m baffled by a film, I’ll try to watch it again. But, in this instance, I don’t think you could pay me enough for that.