Humans adapt to a synthetic environment with new transformations and mutations. With his partner, Caprice, Saul Tenser, a celebrity performance artist, publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances.
Some of my favorite David Cronenberg movies are his more straightforward narratives; “Scanners,” “The Dead Zone,” “The Fly,” A History of Violence,” and “Eastern Promises.” His other films, such as “Naked Lunch,” “Crash,” “Cosmopolis,” and “eXistenZ,” proved to be more than most audiences could handle because of their bizarre and eccentric storylines and peculiar characters. With “Crimes of the Future,” Cronenberg creates a future full of outlandish and perplexing circumstances and even more fantastical characters.
Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux play Saul Tenser and Caprice, respectively, a world-renowned performance artist couple who love to perform for the public but live hermetically when not on stage. The world suffers from a climate-ravaged future, where humans have metamorphosed past pain. Saul has the uncanny ability to grow new organs because he is mutating due to Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, which also causes humans to stop feeling pain. While performing, Saul lies on an operating table as Caprice utilizes a jellied control panel that operates robotic arms with razors, allowing her to slice through his stomach so she can remove any new organs he has grown.
Saul and Caprice are renowned worldwide because of their acts and have therefore drawn the attention of the National Organ Registry. This organization tracks new organ growths and is run by Wippet (Don McKellar), a public servant, and his introverted assistant, Timlin (Kristen Stewart). They attend one of Saul and Caprice’s shows and are entranced by the beauty of it, but soon after that, under cover of night, Saul slips away and meets with Detective Cope (Welket Bungué), an investigator who researches mutations for the New Vice Unit, a secretive government organization. He tells Cope that he was contacted by a man called Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), the enigmatic leader of an underground cult who says they have gone through their own evolution and have created their own source of food; purple candy bars that are made out of plastic. Lang claims that his deceased eight-year-old son Brecken, murdered by his ex-wife, was the first human born with a digestive system that could survive on toxins such as plastic.
Lang begs Saul to perform an autopsy on his son’s body during the next show so he can prove to the world that the next step in evolution has finally arrived, but things don’t go according to plan. As Saul’s condition worsens, Caprice informs him that he is progressively deteriorating, and Saul finds himself surrendering to the only possible solution; ingesting one of Lang’s plastic bars.
“Crimes of the Future” possesses an intriguing narrative, but in the end, it amounts to nothing more than flash over substance. The fact that the story takes place in Greece in the future should be more than enough for Cronenberg to present a more exploratory timeline, but the narrative is so focused on explaining our past that it misses the bullseye altogether. I felt like Cronenberg became so mesmerized with his own future creation that he forgot he was telling a story, and as a result, we are introduced to characters who disappear just as quickly as they are ushered in and are never mentioned again. There are questions that characters ask, and questions that we, the audience, ask, but many of them never get answered. While I am okay with a filmmaker leaving some unresolved predicaments up to the audience, the number of questions that go unanswered here is excessive, thereby painting Cronenberg as just plain lazy. If you are looking for the director of “Scanners,” “The Fly,” “A History of Violence,” and “Eastern Promises,” you will be sorely disappointed. But if you want the director of “Naked Lunch,” “Crash,” and “eXistenZ,” this should be right up your alley.
In Theaters Friday, June 3rd
