Crimes of the Future: Film Review
Before its Cannes premiere, all the headlines about David Cronenberg‘s latest body horror, Crimes of the Future, warned of how disturbing and gross it was. I went in bracing myself for the worst and it’s really not bad in that regard. It’s just terribly dull.
The film is set in a dystopian future where “surgery is the new sex”. It follows Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), a performance artist with the ability to grow new and unnecessary organs. With the help of his partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux), he removes these organs in front of a live audience as a form of performance art and Kristen Stewart‘s Timlin keeps a catalogue of these for the National Organ Registry.
Due to the hype about it being really gory and graphic, I mentally prepared myself for traumatic scenes when I sat down in the cinema. I’ve seen several of Cronenberg’s films so I had an idea of what to expect and perhaps that helped me because I thought the controversial content wasn’t that gruesome (or as brutal as the hype suggested). Given the subject matter, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say you’ll see some surgery scenes. If you’re too squeamish for those, the movie is definitely not for you. I didn’t struggle with any of this content and I’ve seen far worse elsewhere – and I’m not particularly hardy when it comes to graphic scenes.
While I didn’t have problems with the gore, I really struggled with the pace and found it so slow and unengaging. I could not get over how a film with such a concept could be so dull. I was genuinely bored at times! The ideas were interesting but didn’t feel fully developed, plus it wasn’t particularly well-written and there was a lot of exposition involved as the world is so new and foreign to us (and filled with classic Cronenberg-looking devices and equipment).
Now, for the ending. I was shocked by where it stopped because I felt we had so much more to explore. Various threads weren’t seen through to the end – it just stopped without resolving them and didn’t explain certain things. I came away with so many questions. It felt like Cronenberg threw in too many ideas and only remembered to flesh one out to a satisfying conclusion and left the rest dangling.
The main three characters are mysterious and elusive so you never truly get to know them. They are vague sketches rather than fully-fledged people. I found Mortensen just as dull and uninteresting as the film itself, but the ladies fared better – Seydoux is as alluring and sexy as ever and Stewart’s Timlin is quirky and interesting. Her line delivery is bizarre and unexpected but in a fun way.
I expected a lot – clearly too much – from Crimes of the Future and came away feeling quite underwhelmed by it.
In cinemas from Friday 9th September