Crimes of the Future (2022)

David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future is a homecoming of sorts, the director returning to the squelching concerns of his early work. The setting is a future in which pain has largely vanished and the body sprouts organs without permission. A performance artist named Saul Tenser has his new growths removed on stage for paying audiences. His partner Caprice wields the scalpel. An investigator from a government registry hovers nearby, enchanted. A radical cell has learned to eat plastic. A murdered child becomes a political exhibit. The film is many things. It is not a piece of social advocacy. Race goes unremarked. Gender goes unremarked. The environment is a source of mutation, not a cause for a pamphlet. Corporations misbehave in the background and nobody organizes a boycott.

The eroticism is surgical and heterosexual. The film's libido is spent on incisions, zippers, and the moist interior of a man's abdomen. Caprice is a genuine co-protagonist, competent and unbothered, and the screenplay never asks us to read her situation as a statement about women. When a registry clerk announces that surgery is the new sex, the line lands as a wry observation about appetite, not a thesis to be defended. Bodies are opened, examined, and discarded. Nobody here is encouraged to love the skin they are in. They are encouraged to cut it open and see what has grown.

Cronenberg wrote this script in 1998 and, by his own account, changed not a word. That fact explains nearly everything. The film carries the preoccupations of a man who has worried the same knot for fifty years: flesh, machinery, appetite, the queasy pleasure of watching both. It lectures no one. It ends with Tenser eating a bar of synthetic waste, weeping, and smiling while his chair finally stops twitching. There is no moral in that image, only a mood. What remains is a director pursuing his obsessions with the patience of a craftsman and the indifference of a man who has never consulted a focus group about his themes.