Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Crimes of the Future’ on Hulu, David Cronenberg’s Return to Deliciously Squirm-Inducing Form

David Cronenberg doesn’t just make a notable return with Crimes of the Future – now on Hulu – but a return to classic form. In the midst of an arthouse horror revival (resurgence? Reinvigoration?) that often put the phrase “body horror” back in our wet, wet mouths, it makes sense that the guy who essentially invented the subgenre would show everyone how the master does it, with a movie boasting a neat catchphrase: “Surgery is the new sex.” Since 1999’s wonderful WTFer eXistenZ, Cronenberg avoided his signature high-ick-factor tropes (although a strong argument could be made that the extremely nude bathhouse fight scene in Eastern Promises is just body horror of a different type), making, for him at least, relatively conventional psychodramas and thrillers. So it’s with perverse glee that we sit down to watch Crimes of the Future, which promises to make our stomachs churn. At least we hope so, because we like that for some reason.

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Some type of apocalypse appears to have occurred; it feels like a post-internet age. Also, a post-paint age, because all the paint in every place is chipped and cracked and peeling and worn. The lighting is also almost always dim and shadowy. We meet a boy who can consume and digest plastic, disturbingly so. His mother’s feelings are more extreme – she smothers him with a pillow in an act of rageful disgust that implies a desire to eliminate him from the gene pool. Elsewhere: A thing – no other descriptive fits it – resembling a giant, inverted beetle husk hangs from a ceiling on tentacle-like cables. This is a biotech bed, a leathery thing you plug yourself into via appendages that look like they were lifted from the alien-autopsy discard bin. Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) sleeps here, somewhat peacefully one hopes, because for most of us, it looks like nighty-nightmare time. And then he sits in a bony biotech chair that helps him eat breakfast by jerking him around and stimulating his body in some way, and how it works and why he needs it is a mystery, a thing conceptualized by a mighty great weirdo (Cronenberg) to make us feel… what? Creeped out? Fascinated? Upset? Sure, all of that.

Saul is a unique human specimen in many ways. Humanity has evolved to the point where the vast majority of people no longer experience pain, and he’s the rare exception. (Leave it to Cronenberg to concoct a post-pain reality that’s far, far, far from paradise. Far.) His body also regularly generates vestigial organs previously unknown to science. Neat! His incubation of said organs appears to be – “appears to be” being a key phrase in description of this film, which keeps context sketchy and/or suggestive – the source of his pain, because otherwise, he lies peacefully, awake, during surgery as said organs are removed. Removed for a live audience, I might add, because in this future, streaming TV appears to have been replaced with surgery as performance art (depicted with a disappointingly unconvincing blend of practical and CG effects). And Saul is a superstar, gifted by his case of “accelerated evolution syndrome.” His partner in art and, it appears to be, life, is Caprice (Lea Seydoux), who operates using a biotech “autopsy unit.” It’s a very sensual act, complete with pulsing and moaning and people staring like they shouldn’t be staring but can’t stop themselves. And then when Saul and Caprice are done, they take the organ to the “National Organ Registry,” so official government employees Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (Kristen Stewart), an utterly starstruck Tenser fangirl, can catalog it.

The plot floats into Saul and Caprice’s lives like the air of dread accompanying humanity’s apparent evolutionary dead end. It involves the murdered boy’s father, Lang (Scott Speedman), who is frequently seen eating strange purple candy bars; in one scene, an unidentified man takes a bite and dies pretty much instantly. A pair of biotech repairwomen (Lihi Kornowski and Tanaya Beatty) participate in some type of nigh-indescribable comic relief. A detective (Welket Bungue) wants to infiltrate a group of evolutionary extremists, soliciting help from Saul, who keeps his involvement secret from Caprice. All of this is going somewhere, but where exactly, I hadn’t a clue.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Having rubbed my hands all over Crimes of the Future and maybe gliding in close to sniff and lick it a little, it feels like a sister film to eXistenZ, although initially less effective, thus rendering it outside of Cronenberg’s classic oeuvre (which includes, in no particular order, Scanners, The Fly, Videodrome, Crash, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises and Dead Ringers). Taking into account recent searingly effective body horror films, Julia Ducournau out-Cronenberged Cronenberg with the wonderfully deranged Titane.

Performance Worth Watching: Seydoux’s performance is the closest the movie comes to being emotionally accessible, and she’s up for the challenge. Otherwise, Stewart is delightfully weird as the resident scene thief who doesn’t get near enough screen time.

Memorable Dialogue: Saul: “I’m sorry, I’m not very good at the old sex.”

Sex and Skin: As far as the “old” sex is concerned, we get a couple eyefuls of female frontal nudity. “New” sex-wise, fire up the cold shower for scenes in which scalpels cut into torsos so we can see what crazy, heretofore unseen things exist inside them.

Our Take: I’m happy to report that Cronenberg’s perplexing, disconcerting fetishes are fully intact after some time out of the public sphere. Your squirming is an act of exultation! But Crimes of the Future – related in title only to Cronenberg’s early short film – retains some of the understated qualities of his post-2000 work in that it concludes not with the gooey disgusting explosion of pus and slime of the Brundlefly tragedy, but with a sly smile that implies something resembling hope. Hope for the perseverance of the human race, although our humanity may be forever in question; please ponder the difference.

Let’s pull a thread. The evolutionary discontinuation of “pain” in this context is never clarified – clearly, physical pain is kaput, but what about psychological pain? The film’s muted tone suggests that it, too, is on the chopping block. Can pleasure exist without pain? Arguably, no. Sex as we know it is being co-opted by a desire to experience all-too-literal “inner beauty.” And without sex, reproduction is a question mark. Without pain and our need to avoid it, self-preservation as a base survival tactic is being phased out. Read into the physical surroundings of this world: the ocean’s gorgeous and robust shade of blue, and humans living among old-construction near-ruins, suggest nature has rebounded from what we can only assume is an environmental disaster. This is a grim portrait of an existential crisis. Remember, evolution has no emotion; it’s a mechanism.

Perhaps this story – shambolic, muddled and somewhat anarchic, but dense with atmosphere – functions as a metaphor for numbness, and how it encroaches upon us like twilight unto darkness. And in Cronenberg’s dimly lit world, people maintain their vitality through artistic expression, strange and vexatious as it may be, staving off that numbness. We watch with eyes wide open, sometimes recoiling, sometimes laughing as the filmmaker packs the screen with wild images, with ideas that maybe don’t fully, neatly crystallize, but maybe don’t have to, either. Crimes of the Future may not be as viscerally satisfying as Cronenberg’s other work; he shows no compulsion for histrionics, or desire to preach the politics of dire futures. No, his concern is for our souls.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Crimes of the Future isn’t a new beginning for, or the apex of, body horror. But Cronenberg still works in the medium of provocation like a master.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

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