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Through a shocking sequence that plays like an oblique explanation of its title, David Cronenberg ’s evasive mind-and-body-bender “Crimes of the Future” cracks open in its early moments, tracing a harrowing crime that gets committed during some nondescript time in the future, in the grim corners of a near-derelict home. It’s a nimble, stylish prologue that functions as a keyhole into the vast and fleshly world the writer/director has erected: a little boy enters a grubby bathroom and starts to devour a trash can hungrily, like a freshly-minted vampire overeager to quench his newfound thirst for blood. Though this betrayal to the human-body-as-we-know-it wouldn’t be the only (or the actual ) crime we’d witness. Soon, in an act of desperation, the boy’s repulsed mother would murder her offspring, having just witnessed the boy’s inexplicably inhuman appetite for plastic.

Based on this confidently uncanny opening alone, it makes sense to learn that it was towards the end of the 20 th Century when Cronenberg conceived this story, in which our kind has mutated to grow new organs and evolved to make the notion of pain near-extinct. After all, that was the era that defined his carnal brand of cinema—namely, his preoccupations with the human body and the ways flesh intersects with the mechanisms and advancement of modern technology—and more or less ended with 1999’s “eXistenZ,” before concerns of the more visceral kind (of course, still with droplets of body horror) took hold of his filmography on this side of the 2000s. In that regard, “Crimes of the Future” (which shares a title and nothing else with a 1970 picture by the filmmaker) finds “the king of venereal horror” operate squarely in a universe that earned him this aforesaid label: you know, a world made up of the sliced torsos of “Videodrome,” the injured appendages of “ Crash ,” and the deliciously wicked eroticism that somehow flows through it all.

All these meaty graphic and psychological signifiers are also the blood and guts of “Crimes of the Future,” albeit a bit predictably sometimes. With imagery purposely and all-too-obviously reminiscent of some of the visuals that existed in the master’s previous work, one can’t unsee a certain banality on occasion or shake a fan-service-y inkling. Still, it’s irresistible to see Cronenberg pivot to his classic mode to dissect weighty anxieties around mortality and perhaps even humankind’s inevitable annihilation. If one feels no pain, if there is no cautionary system inherent to our bodies that warns us about our terminal limits, if unknown organs (or tumors) routinely sprout inside of our torsos, would we have a fighting chance to survive in the long run?

It’s a bit heady to consider all this existential apprehension in our (allegedly) post-Covid world where the talk of yet another imminent variant and possible surge is proving to be psychologically crippling. Perhaps all one can do is learn to live with and manipulate the unknown, like the rebellious performance artist Saul Tenser (a stony, mystical Viggo Mortensen ) has done. While the celebrity showman confesses to his distaste for what’s been happening to his own body, he at least seems to have managed to make something of his condition in the interim, alongside the former trauma surgeon-turned Saul’s creative partner Caprice (a subtle and sophisticated Léa Seydoux , infusing the on-screen chaos with a swish of calm). Together, the duo have spun the whole process of surgeries into a performative exhibition, perhaps in order to find some meaning and assurance amid volatile unpredictability, or to leave something behind to counter the crippling sense of void. Often, the two conduct live, you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it kind of surgeries on Saul in front of an in-person audience, pushing his body to its limit for the sake of art. More than once, you hear this process being deemed as a way to open the body up to new possibilities. The thesis goes something like this: if pain is archaic, then the body itself can be molded into art. And what is all that molding, all that operative modification of skin through human hands and inventive surgical machines, if not a new kind of intercourse? What’s an open wound if not an invitation for, well ... oral sex?

Indeed, it’s no coincidence that there is a coital quality in nearly everything Cronenberg caresses with cinematographer Douglas Koch ’s sensual camera, unearthing an otherworldly kind of eroticism from the film’s ample machinery, physicality, and grotesquely exposed bowels. Among those who secretly feel that sexiness is Timlin ( Kristen Stewart , bringing along some comic relief with her character’s muffled voice and endearingly insecure stance), a bureaucratic investigator from the “National Organ Registry,” tracking new organ growths alongside her partner Wippet ( Don McKellar ). Like everyone, she is tempted by Saul and Stewart has fun with Timlin’s giving into that temptation like a Ninotchka with a sudden appreciation for opulent indecencies. (Believe it or not, the scene in which the young woman stuffs her fingers in Saul’s mouth is among the film’s tamer moments.)

In fairness, how could she resist all the intrigue? On the other side of the screen, you might find yourself combatting akin urges, desiring to pop inside the picture and if nothing else, feel your way through legendary production designer (and decades-long Cronenberg collaborator) Carol Spier ’s blood-curdling imagination. From a hovering, cocoon-like bed with buggy tentacles connected Saul to clanking metals of machines, her creations not only synch up with all-things-Cronenbergian, but wink to the designs of “ Alien .”

On the whole, the effort to make heads or tails of the philosophies at the heart of “Crimes of the Future” is a laborious one amid a crowded canvas of players—among them are Scott Speedman ’s enigmatic leader and a memorable Welket Bungué’s complicated detective—and open-ended ideas unsure of what to do with themselves. Yes, this operatic science fiction is filled with vague, half-finished stabs at the notions of evolution, societal disorder, and the tragedy that is the vanishing of environmental ecosystems, the ultimate crime committed by mankind. Still, it’s nothing short of overwhelming to ponder these queries amid a parade of eye-popping body horror, from stitched lips and eyes, to ears growing out of every inch of one’s body. It’s not exactly revolutionary, and more alarming than scary. But it’s still provocatively feverish stuff from the dearly missed vintage annals of Cronenberg. 

Opens on June 3rd.

Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to  RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

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Film credits.

Crimes of the Future (2022)

Rated R for strong disturbing violent content and grisly images, graphic nudity and some language.

107 minutes

Viggo Mortensen as Saul Tenser

Léa Seydoux as Caprice

Kristen Stewart as Timlin

Welket Bungué as Chaulk

Don McKellar as Wippet

Scott Speedman as Lang Daughtery

• David Cronenberg

Cinematographer

• Douglas Koch
• Christopher Donaldson
• Howard Shore

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‘Crimes of the Future’ Review: The Horror, the Horror

In his latest shocker, David Cronenberg prophetically reads the signs while Léa Seydoux performs surgeries on a beatific Viggo Mortensen.

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By Manohla Dargis

Few filmmakers slither under the skin and directly into the head as mercilessly as David Cronenberg. For decades, he has been unsettling audiences, derailing genre expectations and expanding the limits of big-screen entertainment with exploding heads, gasping wounds and desiring, suffering, metamorphosing bodies. A modern-day augur, he opens up characters — psychically and physically — with a detached cool and scalpel-like cinematic technique, exploring what lies (and festers) inside as he divines prophetic meaning.

His latest, “Crimes of the Future,” is very tough and creepy, yet improbably relaxed; it’s a low-key dispatch from the end of the world. Set in an indeterminate future, it centers on a pair of artists — Viggo Mortensen as Saul, Léa Seydoux as Caprice — who mount surgeries as performances. With Saul lying supine in a biomorphic apparatus as viewers gaze from the sidelines, Caprice — using a multicolored controller — delicately probes Saul’s viscera, removing mysterious new organs that have grown inside his body. The audience members are quiet, attentive, respectful (moviegoers might yelp); for his part, Saul looks ecstatic.

The movie takes place in a depopulated waterfront city where the carcasses of rusted, barnacle-covered ships languish on the shore. There, in shadowy streets and derelict buildings, men and women roam, often without apparent purpose, as if heavily medicated or perhaps blasted by that collective devastation called reality. There’s a disconcerting, characteristically Cronenbergian lack of affect to most of them — few experience pain anymore — even when they’re carving one another up in dark corners or in performances. Times have changed, but the human appetite for violence and spectacle remain intact.

The story emerges incrementally in scenes that seem to drift even as they lock into place. In between performances and shoptalk, Saul and Caprice are drawn into overlapping intrigues involving a dead child and an inner-beauty pageant. An amusing Kristen Stewart shows up with Don McKellar in a decrepit office that once could have been used by Philip Marlowe, but now has the disquieting words “National Organ Registry” inscribed on the front door. There’s also a cop (Welket Bungué) who skulks around with Saul in the shadows, where the dead child’s father (Scott Speedman) lurks enigmatically.

For the most part, the world in “Crimes of the Future” resembles what you imagine everyday life might look like in a not-too-distant future, one defined by need, decay, violence, extreme entertainment and environmental catastrophes of our own wretched making. It is terrible, and eerily familiar. But Cronenberg doesn’t pass judgment on it or shake his fist at the sky. Instead, with visual precision, arid humor, restrained melancholia and a wildly inventive vision of tomorrow that puts those of most movie futurists to shame, he reveals a world that can be agony to look at, exposing its pulpy innards much like Caprice opens up Saul.

Mortensen and Seydoux are the conjoined heart and soul of “Crimes of the Future,” and they imbue the movie with waves of feeling, appreciably warming the overall chill. His eyebrows seemingly shaved and face often obscured by a scarf, Saul presents a curious figure, one who’s at once an artist, ninja and religious ascetic. Although his hands and feet look undamaged, the placement of the cables on his appendages — as well as the many cuts that Caprice makes on his body during their performances — evoke stigmata, the wounds of the crucified Christ. And Saul does suffer, clearly, but for whom? For him, Caprice, us?

“Crimes of the Future” is about a lot of things, including desire and death, pain and pleasure, transformation and transcendence. Saul is its centerpiece. You first see him at home in bed, a structure that hangs from the ceiling like a suspended cradle. It’s striking, but what really catches the eye are the bed’s cables, medical tubing that look like elephant trunks and are attached to Saul’s pale, bare hands and feet. The bottom of each cable resembles a small webbed hand, a distinctly anthropomorphic vision that makes it seem as if he were being cared for by an extraterrestrial nanny.

The attentiveness of Saul’s care, including from Caprice, makes a painful contrast with the horrific indifference shown to the movie’s one child (Sotiris Siozos). “Crimes of the Future” begins with the murder of this child; it’s a visceral, distressing jolt that will drive at least some moviegoers out of the theaters. Opening a story with a shock of violence is an obvious way to kick-start events, create intrigue, hook the audience. We are used to it. The murder of a child, though, is more unsettling than most screen violence. That’s partly because of its horror, but also because — while movies show us many ghastly things — they like to package violence, sex it up, make it cinematic. They resist showing us at our real and abject worst.

In strictly functional terms, the murder serves as a red flag — a kind of trigger warning for the movie audience — an announcement of intent or at least narrative limits. Cronenberg is, I think, telegraphing what kind of movie you’re about to watch: He will not be taking any prisoners or blunting the story’s edges. The murder is genuinely awful and it rocks you to the core, creating a low, unwavering thrum of deep unease that remains intact through the disparate narrative turns and tone shifts. Most movies that deploy violence tidy it up with empty outrage and vacuous moralizing; here, the violence haunts you.

In its themes, body work and convulsions of violence, “Crimes of the Future” evokes some of Cronenberg’s other films, notably “Videodrome,” a shocker about (among other things) a man who loses his mind. This new movie feels more melancholic than many of the earlier ones, though perhaps I’m the one who’s changed. Once again, people are evolving and devolving, mutating into something familiar yet also something different and terrifying. Yet despite the morbid laughs and the beatific smile that can light up Saul’s face like that of St. Teresa of Ávila, “Crimes of the Future” feels like a requiem. Cronenberg has always been a diagnostician of the human condition; here, he also feels a lot like a mortician.

Crimes of the Future Rated R for filicide, surgeries and power-drill violence. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic of The Times since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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“Crimes of the Future,” Reviewed: It’s the End of the World as David Cronenberg Knew It

By Richard Brody

David Cronenberg’s new film, “Crimes of the Future,” is launched by a crime of the past, one that emerges from classical Greek mythology: the murder of a young boy by his mother. The movie’s setting and action are as stylized and abstracted as those of classical tragedy, and, for that matter, “Crimes of the Future” was filmed in Greece. But the murder, far from unleashing the movie’s tragic power, is, rather, only a symbol or marker of it—a subordinate plot point of little emotional import. “Crimes of the Future” is, for better and worse, a conceptual film; it’s less an experience than it is an idea, less a drama of characters’ experiences than an allegory for Cronenberg ’s despairingly diagnostic view of present-day crimes, ones that society commits against society.

“Crimes of the Future” is a thinly conceived dystopian fantasy that offers its characters little psychology and little context, little view of the social order around them or the history that led them there; it displays ideas in isolation from their whys and wherefores. In this regard, it’s a classic “late film”—it’s the first feature that Cronenberg, who’s seventy-nine, has made since 2014, and what he has to say here he lays on the line with few of the blandishments of popular movies, and little of the aesthetic care of art-house ones. It’s a movie to have seen rather than to see. The ideas that Cronenberg puts forth are powerful and poignant; his subject is the effort to make art amid a despoiled cultural environment and debased cultural consumption. It’s a drama of eight years of silence, of a vision of the end of the line, the end of the world as he knew it.

In the movie’s first dramatic scene, the boy’s mother, Djuna (Lihi Kornowski), finds the boy, Brecken (Sozos Sotiris), sitting on the floor of their bathroom, munching on a plastic garbage basket—which is telling, as “Crimes of the Future” is very much about the crimes of consumption and the system of production that led to them. The movie’s protagonists are a couple of artists, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux), who live and work together. Saul, who has a sort of “accelerated evolution syndrome,” manages to generate inside himself—supposedly even wills into being—new internal organs of unspecified function or no function at all. In private, Caprice examines them invasively, by inserting an endoscopic-lens tube through his skin into his abdomen. Then, in public, their performances involve Saul lying passively on an “autopsy bed,” which Caprice manipulates, via remote control, to open him up and extract these new organs, to the hushed and breathless delight of their audience. (Though directing a film of body horror, Cronenberg tones down the gross-out, in quality and quantity, as if rendering it a mere symbol of itself.)

Notably, with all the piercings and carvings and penetrations of the body, there’s no question of infection or, for that matter, of blood flow. Caprice sterilizes nothing, cleans nothing, suctions nothing, and closes up Saul’s wounds with a mere heat seal. But, most important, these procedures are painless, and the human species’ newly built-in insensibility is a crucial detail: pain has nearly disappeared. This is a fact of grave import because pain, one character says, is a “warning system.” The warnings are gone, and humanity has crossed the boundary into a danger zone and can’t, it seems, cross back, though not for lack of trying. There’s a National Organ Registry, run by a pair of investigators named Wippet (Don McKellar), a longtimer, and his younger associate, Timlin ( Kristen Stewart ), who enforce the government’s repression of evolution manipulators—yet secretly admire them. Saul dutifully reports his new creations in detail, even donates them to the registry, but there’s something about his art that nonetheless renders him and Caprice suspicious; they get summoned to the registry for an interrogation, and a detective named Cope (Welket Bungué), with whom Saul has a shadowy connection, in turn questions the registrars about him.

For Cronenberg, the connection between art and bodies, between creative endeavors and the enduring physical transformation of human life, is a long-standing inspiration, as in “Videodrome,” from 1983. In “Crimes of the Future,” he takes that idea even more literally. Saul’s art is literally visceral; it takes place amid a process of rapid evolutionary transformation that it both responds to and accelerates. It isn’t only the body that has changed. Society at large has overcome the duality of the analog and the digital, by means of the organic. Caprice examines Saul as he lies in a pod that resembles a large soft-tissue organ; the autopsy bed’s remote control is formed like a small handheld brain. Even the throne-like chair, in which the transfigured Saul eats, is made of bones that move. How Saul got his self-propagating powers is never made clear, but that mystery, for all its hand-waving vagueness, hints at the underlying premise—the very mystery of artistic ability and power. Saul’s ability is a given; what he does with it, and the obstacles that he faces in realizing it, are the drama.

The relationship between Saul and Caprice is, in many ways, like that of director and actress. His active work is essentially internal, and his public side is essentially passive and requires the active, public, theatrical work of a woman, an actress, to bring it to the world. She’s at least as much of an artist as he is; she refers to the autopsy bed as her “paintbrush,” and Cope wonders whether Saul is an artist at all but only a “glorified organ donor.” Saul is introduced to Dr. Nasatir (Yorgos Pirpassopoulos), a plastic surgeon who specializes in “inner beauty.” (It’s a quote from Cronenberg’s 1988 medical-horror film, “Dead Ringers.”) Nasatir wants to enter Saul into an “inner-beauty pageant” in the category of “best original organ with no known function.” Yet, at the registry, Saul is encouraged to “aim higher,” to go for “best in show.” Timlin, who has body-artistic aspirations of her own, wonders whether “surgery is the new sex.” She wants to be a part of Saul’s act, and also to be his lover. Saul says that he’s “not very good at the old sex.”

The “new sex,” indeed, takes place in and around the autopsy bed and involves scalpels and synthetic orifices (including the one, involving a zipper built into Saul’s abdomen, that Caprice erotically opens). Yet the “old sex” still, apparently, is what makes babies—and it’s the creation of a new generation that’s the linchpin of the action. (Spoilers are inevitable.) Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), the father of the plastic-eating Brecken, is himself a plastic eater; Lang is among the many, in the new world at hand, who have made themselves that way. He’s no disinterested artist—he has a huge stake in the transformation and the transformed as the manufacturer of “synth,” a plasticized, candy-bar-like food. What’s more, this plastic-eating trait splices into the genetic structure and is passed along to the next generation—i.e., Brecken—thus transforming the human species.

This Lamarckian vision of a new human species is buttressed by an ideological twist of presumptive virtue, one with shades of Stalin’s geneticist, Trofim Lysenko : the power of plastic eaters to clean up the environmental mess left by preceding generations. The analogy to synthetic entertainment and the enduring transformations that it wreaks is clear; Brecken’s mother kills the child whose father produced the superhero movies and the C.G.I. sludge that the new, transformed generation of children can’t stop consuming, and consume exclusively. “The world is killing our children from the inside out” is a line dropped in the film after Brecken’s death. By killing her child, Djuna both takes a Medea-like revenge on her ex-husband and tries to save the world from the doom that he fosters. Yet, like the dubious industrial heroes of the present day, Lang may well have the last laugh, as the leader of a movement to forge a brighter technological future.

The world of “Crimes of the Future” is lugubrious. Its buildings are dilapidated, like they’ve survived some recent catastrophe. The town is sunk deep in shadows and gloom, and even the sunlight is muted. Saul passes through its streets in a black cowl and a mask, looking like a scythe-less Grim Reaper. There’s an element of low-tech surveillance and authoritarian repression, a warning about “subversive groups” and ambient murmurs of martyrs and causes. Moreover, what’s transgressive about Saul and Caprice’s art is its dangerous overlap with the industrial evolutionary manipulations of Lang and the plastic eaters. Saul begins to wonder whether there’s any place at all for his work in a world that’s veering toward the production and consumption of synthetics rather than organics. The grimness of the world around him—of being inescapably affected by the encroaching realm of artifice, of being too much a part of the world he lives in—leaves Saul with the tragic sense that he and his art have outlived their times. Cronenberg’s implicit self-portraiture is the film’s most personal, most visceral element. He makes his long-awaited return to the movies through the exit door.

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Movie Reviews

'crimes of the future' is a dystopian thriller that cuts to the heart.

Justin Chang

Kristen Stewart (left) is a fan of the surgery Léa Seydoux performs in Crimes of the Future . Neon hide caption

Kristen Stewart (left) is a fan of the surgery Léa Seydoux performs in Crimes of the Future .

With its graphic images of stomachs being sliced open, organs being removed, and eyes and mouths being sewn shut, David Cronenberg 's Crimes of the Future is certainly not for the squeamish. But then why, as someone who self-identifies as squeamish, did I enjoy it so much? Maybe it's because while this director loves his gaping wounds and exploding heads, he wields his scalpel here with extraordinary finesse.

There's a cool elegance and a disarming playfulness to this movie that pulls you in, even (or especially) at its most grotesque moments. And as with most of Cronenberg's movies, the pleasures are intellectual as well as visceral. Crimes of the Future isn't always easy to watch, but it's an awful lot of fun to think about.

The movie takes place in a grim future where humans have lost the ability to feel physical pain and have started operating on their own bodies. In this thrill-seeking world, surgery is the new sex — something that a lot of people do for kicks or even to earn a quick buck from live audiences. Others — like Saul Tenser, played by Viggo Mortensen, and his partner, Caprice, played by Léa Seydoux — have elevated it to a form of avant-garde performance art.

Saul has a medical condition in which his body keeps producing abnormal organs, which Caprice removes during their nightly shows. As grisly as these public spectacles are, the fact that the characters don't feel pain has a similarly anesthetizing effect on us as viewers. And there's a kinky pleasure to these scenes, too: Saul, lying in a high-tech, coffin-like bed called a Sark module, clearly enjoys being sliced open by Caprice's remote-controlled blades.

Cronenberg & Mortensen, Making 'Eastern Promises'

Cronenberg & mortensen, making 'eastern promises'.

One of the funnier things about Crimes of the Future is that it plays like a deadpan satire of the modern art world, in which Saul and Caprice must contend with rivals, fans and even groupies. But not unlike Saul's restless body, the movie itself keeps mutating, switching genres and sprouting new ideas at will.

The story morphs into a noirish mystery, complete with a nosy detective and a couple of power-drill-wielding femmes fatales. It's also a bizarrely touching love story, and both Mortensen and Seydoux suggest a deep core of passion beneath their characters' clinical exchanges. The movie is also an ecological parable, in which human biology is changing dramatically in response to a rapidly decaying environment. One key subplot involves an underground group of eco-anarchists who have willfully altered their bodies so that they can digest plastic and thus consume much of the planet's industrial waste.

There's a lot going on here, in other words, and Crimes of the Future spends a fair amount of time unpacking its own premise, though with a droll wit that keeps the exposition from sounding too much like exposition. As ever, Cronenberg and his longtime production designer, Carol Spier, are adept at telling their story visually. Some of their more memorable inventions are the devices that Saul uses to offset the effects of his condition: a giant bed that gyrates when he sleeps, or a mechanized chair that aids with his eating and digestion.

None of this is exactly new territory for Cronenberg. He actually wrote the script for Crimes of the Future more than 20 years ago but the movie never got off the ground until now. That may explain why it plays like a return to his career-long obsessions in films like The Fly and Crash , both of which examined how technology is literally reshaping the human body. In his 1983 horror classic, Videodrome , the characters kept saying "Long live the new flesh!" — a grim mantra that's hard not to think about in Crimes of the Future , whenever a scalpel touches skin.

Cronenberg is asking, quite sincerely: What are we doing to our planet, and how is that affecting the very composition of our bodies — and in turn, the next phase of human evolution? And not for the first time, he makes brilliant use of his regular collaborator, Viggo Mortensen, who starred in earlier Cronenberg dramas like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises . In those movies, Mortensen played physically imposing gangsters; in Crimes of the Future , his character moves slowly and speaks in a raspy voice, rendered frail by his condition. There's great tenderness in Mortensen's performance, and he and Seydoux are very moving as two people who can truly be said to love each other, body and soul. That rush of romantic feeling may be the most shocking thing about Crimes of the Future : For all its blood and guts, this movie's biggest organ is its heart.

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Crimes of the Future

Humans adapt to a synthetic environment, with new transformations and mutations. With his partner Caprice, Saul Tenser, celebrity performance artist, publicly showcases the metamorphosis of ... Read all Humans adapt to a synthetic environment, with new transformations and mutations. With his partner Caprice, Saul Tenser, celebrity performance artist, publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. Humans adapt to a synthetic environment, with new transformations and mutations. With his partner Caprice, Saul Tenser, celebrity performance artist, publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances.

• David Cronenberg
• Viggo Mortensen
• Léa Seydoux
• Kristen Stewart
• 383 User reviews
• 291 Critic reviews
• 68 Metascore
• 14 wins & 36 nominations

• Saul Tenser

• Lang Dotrice

• Adrienne Berceau
• (as Efi Kantza)

• Dr. Nasatir

• Beauty Spa Woman
• (uncredited)
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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Viggo Mortensen suffered Quadriceps Muscle Contusion when struck by a non-participating horse at the American Kentucky Derby and as a result was unable to stand for periods longer than two minutes. This resulted in his character constantly kneeling while giving exposition and monologues.
• Goofs Around the 44th minute, when Caprice and Saul use the bed for their own play, the cuts on her chest differ between the scene when she was alone and after he joined her on the bed.

Timlin : Surgery is the new sex.

• Connections Featured in Amanda the Jedi Show: CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is the Most Disgusting Movie of the Year? | Explained (2022)
• Soundtracks Body Is Reality Written and produced by Howard Shore © 2022 South Fifth Avenue Publishing (ASCAP)

User reviews 383

• Jul 11, 2022
• How long is Crimes of the Future? Powered by Alexa
• June 3, 2022 (Canada)
• United Kingdom
• Official Neon
• Tội Ác Tương Lai
• Piraeus, Greece (hotel Sparti exteriors: Kapodistriou 18)
• Serendipity Point Films
• Téléfilm Canada
• Ingenious Media
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $35,000,000 (estimated)
• Jun 5, 2022

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 47 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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Crimes of the Future is extreme surgery by way of classic film noir

Welcome to the inner beauty pageant.

By Adi Robertson , a senior tech and policy editor focused on VR, online platforms, and free expression. Adi has covered video games, biohacking, and more for The Verge since 2011.

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Art is painful and unpredictable in Crimes of the Future , David Cronenberg’s latest film. As a work of art itself, though, Crimes of the Future has a remarkable amount of polish. The movie brings Cronenberg back to science fiction for the first time in two decades, and it melds his signature squishy body horror with a luxuriant retro-futuristic aesthetic and a murky but carefully traced story about artists at the end of the world — or the birth of a new one. It’s a film whose tagline is “surgery is the new sex,” but the results are less shocking and more pleasurable than they might sound.

Crimes of the Future is (presumably) set in the future, but there’s little indication as to when or where. It takes place in a grimy metropolis where technology ranges from camcorders and CRTs to fleshy jellyfish-like anesthetic beds. Rusting boats lie half-submerged on a beach on the edge of town, where rotting plastic pollutes the sand. Most of the population has become inured to pain and disease, and they’ve begun to grow mysterious new body parts. The only remaining art form in this future is extreme surgery, and its virtuoso performers are a duo named Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux), who live in an abandoned industrial facility equipped to treat Tenser’s strange physical quirks.

Tenser is revered among future-bohemians for his unprecedented ability to grow novel internal organs. Caprice extracts these in live performances with an eerie surgery machine composed of bones, caressing a controller that looks like a Milton Bradley Simon game was eaten by a deep-sea isopod. Tenser’s new parts are then cataloged by a ramshackle organization called the National Organ Registry, which is run by the avuncular Wippet (Don McKellar) and the high-strung Timlin (Kristen Stewart). The rare skeptic of organ art is Detective Cope (Welket Bungué), a “New Vice Unit of Justice” agent on the trail of an extremist group. (He admits the bureau name was chosen to sound cool.)

The film’s horror hits hardest outside the surgical theater

There’s a lot of classic Cronenberg visual language here, including the jellyfish bed and an obsession with grotesque-yet-sensual disfigurement. Meanwhile, the shadowy sets and placeless glamour evoke the broader tradition of German Expressionist-influenced sci-fi noir, in the vein of Brazil or City of Lost Children . The film’s dialogue has a dryly comic snappiness that feels like a twisted pastiche of a ‘40s Humphrey Bogart script.

Like many a good film noir, everyone’s loyalties are tangled and sometimes inscrutable. Bureaucratic agencies seem to operate at cross-purposes with no real government to guide them. A powerful corporation hovers around the edges of the world, but its avatars are a pair of mechanics (Nadia Litz and Tanaya Beatty) who spontaneously undress in front of clients. The world-weary Tenser is playing several sides of a brewing conflict and looks exhausted by the effort. While the film isn’t exactly slow-moving, the plot is twisty enough that it’s not always evident where its long conversations and meditative surgical scenes are going — but they’re enlivened with strikingly bizarre future-tech and absurdist plot points like an “Inner Beauty Pageant.”

Cronenberg predicted that Crimes of the Future would make viewers walk out of screenings, and apparently some Cannes attendees did just that when it premiered. It’s got all the trappings of splatterpunk body horror: skeletal machines split skin like ripe fruit; facial features grow where they shouldn’t; and characters are aroused by bloody, yonic wounds.

But the film is so glossy and stylized that this sounds more outré than it is. Unlike Cronenberg’s best-known violence-as-sex movies Crash and Videodrome , there’s no sense of some unnerving new techno-culture encroaching on our own world. Bodies are frequently mutilated but also putty-like and invulnerable. The violence enacted on them rarely seems to stick. There’s little of the raw discomfort of a film like Julia Ducournau’s genuinely difficult-to-watch Titane , because the characters themselves seem so unfazed. Surgery might be the new sex, but in the chaste landscape of contemporary film , the results are less shocking than old sex would be.

Instead, the horror hits hardest in parts that aren’t overtly bloody — including any time a character eats something, which ends up producing scenes far more quietly disturbing than the film’s surgical feats. Crimes of the Future’s central mystery concerns the nature of the “accelerated evolution syndrome” that’s struck people like Tenser. At first, it seems purely like the human body going haywire, and Tenser considers the changes a curse; his art is an attempt to maintain control over his own flesh as it tries to transform into something new. But to others, like the criminal group that New Vice is pursuing, it’s a necessary physiological adaptation for an ugly future.

As Tenser skulks around the city in a flowing black costume, the group’s revolutionary movement is trying to push humanity toward a form that can survive by literally consuming the plastic pollution it’s pumped into the environment. Its leader (Scott Speedman) wants Caprice to dissect his son, a performance he claims will reveal an enigmatic and important truth. Crimes of the Future’s characters are caught between a decadent, decaying old world and a miserably efficient new one, and it’s not clear what even the most brilliant art can do to change that.

One word: microplastics

There’s a compelling intersection between Crimes of the Future’s baroque metaphors about art and its extremely literal environmental themes. Tenser and Caprice are stuck in the sci-fi version of an eternal debate over aesthetics and meaning, ambivalent of fans who love their work for precisely the wrong reasons and participating in an aesthetically interesting project for an unsettling political cause. The futuristic surgical art scene is a sympathetic caricature of its present-day fine art counterpart, full of people who are undeniably pretentious but still capable of delivering an entertaining speech or satisfyingly grotesque set piece.

Like fans of Tenser’s surgical art, it’s easy to read meaning into Crimes of the Future. While the film was written around 1999, it taps into very contemporary anxieties about climate change, pollution, and intergenerational conflict. But it’s more satisfying to fall into a weird, gorgeous exploration of a surreal subculture — just be careful of the microplastics.

Crimes of the Future will be released in theaters June 3rd.

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Viggo mortensen and léa seydoux in david cronenberg’s ‘crimes of the future’: film review | cannes 2022.

Kristen Stewart and Scott Speedman also star in the Canadian auteur’s return to body horror and bizarre human evolution in a future where surgery is the new sex.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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David Cronenberg goes full Cronenberg in Crimes of the Future , to a degree that’s largely been missing from his more real-world psychological dramas of the last 20 years. That will be welcome news to longtime admirers of the Canadian body-horror maestro’s freakier sci-fi spectrum, even if the provocative premise here — about human evolution in the face of invasive technology and an inhospitable environment — is dulled by an ending that feels abrupt and inconclusive. The film offers up more mysteries than it solves. Still, riveting work from Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux as performance artists whose canvas is internal organ mutations will draw the curious to this Neon release after its Cannes competition premiere.

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While the throwbacks to classic Cronenberg are extensive, the film that seems most adjacent to this new entry is 1998’s Crash , which eroticized automobile collision injuries and human bodies subjecting themselves to near fatalities for sexual thrills, anticipating Titane by more than two decades. Given that the original Crimes of the Future script was written in 1999, the two Cronenberg films make sense as companion pieces.

Crimes of the Future

Venue : Cannes Film Festival (Competition) Release date : Friday, June 3 Cast : Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman, Welket Bungué, Don McKellar, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Tanaya Beatty, Nadia Litz, Lihi Kornowski, Denise Capezza Director-screenwriter : David Cronenberg

The porny psychopathology this time around is the penetration of the body by a different kind of metal, surgical scalpels, wielded either by computer-controlled beds with operating limbs, manufactured by a shady corporation named Lifeform Ware, or by the many people now practicing “desktop surgery,” for voyeuristic audiences or for their own pervy kicks.

Mortensen plays Saul Tenser, an underworld celebrity thanks to his advanced case of Accelerated Evolution Syndrome. This causes his body to form abnormal new organs with increasing frequency; those tumors are then observed, tattooed or removed by his lover Caprice (Seydoux) in avant-garde performance pieces. She conducts these ritualistic operations on a modified Lifeform Ware autopsy table called a Sark, a major turn-on for LW technicians Router (Nadia Litz) and Berst (Tanaya Beatty), who have never before seen one of the obsolete models.

Saul actually has a house full of LW equipment, including an Orchid Bed and a Breakfaster Chair, gurgling technological appliances that mirror organic forms to anticipate pain and adjust the body accordingly. (They recall the surrealistic insectoid creations of Cronenberg’s divisive take on William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch , as well as weird technology conjured for films like Videodrome and eXistenZ .) Saul is such a productive source of unique neo-organs that he has donated the meticulously sketched Tenser Organography to the National Organ Registry.

That Orwellian-sounding governmental department operates out of a dingy office headed by career bureaucrats Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin ( Kristen Stewart ), the latter increasingly less shy about her star-fucker obsession with Saul. “Surgery is the new sex,” she whispers to him with a barely suppressed desire to go under the knife. The NOR is linked to the New Vice Unit, a justice department represented by Detective Cope (Welket Bungué). Saul serves as an informant in Cope’s investigation into the human body’s uncontrolled morphology as pain thresholds disappear.

That investigation focuses on a shadow group whose local chapter is headed by Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman); he subsists on what look like candy bars but prove toxic to the uninitiated. His ex-wife Djuna (Lihi Kornowski) is in prison for the murder of their 8-year-old son, who opens the film contentedly demonstrating the kind of genetic adaptation that the NVU fears is spiraling into anarchy.

Cronenberg’s fascination with the intersection between human life and technology has informed many of his films, and there’s a darkly beguiling visual quality to his exploration of that unsettling gray zone here, with invaluable contributions from his longtime production designer, Carol Spier, and first-time DP, Douglas Koch. Even more significant is the enveloping effect of Howard Shore’s turbulent score, a full-bodied, noirish dreamscape that adds substance to a story perhaps slightly undercooked on the page.

That’s particularly the case in the later action, in which the various strands come together with insufficient lucidity, and some of the macabre humor (an “inner beauty pageant”) cuts into the brooding atmosphere. As has often been the case with the director’s second-tier work, the approach is too cold and cerebral to, ahem, get under the skin.

Performances at times are limited by the cryptic nature of the writing, notably that of Stewart, whose first collaboration with Cronenberg promised more exciting sparks. Adopting a high-pitched, febrile voice that makes her seem like she’s still in character from Spencer , Stewart’s Timlin jitters around the edges of the story without ever becoming crucial to its development, despite increasing evidence of her hidden agenda.

Litz and Beatty chip in with the erotica as well as the sinister threat, McKellar brings welcome eccentricity, and Speedman teases out the mystery about “that creature he calls his son,” as Djuna describes the boy.

But the movie is most compelling as a two-person show about a couple deriving pleasure from acts that are not for the squeamish. Mortensen, who did arguably the best work of his career in the back-to-back Cronenberg dramas A History of Violence and Eastern Promises , lurks in the shadows in a hooded cloak, an enigmatic man whose charisma is as much a part of the culty sideshow attraction as his appetite for being sliced open and sealed up again.

Seydoux is sensational, an intensely sensual presence who has turned her past profession as a trauma surgeon into a passionate art form. “It’s my paintbrush,” she says of the Sark bed and its creepy, scalpel-tipped arms. Caprice is fine with having foreign objects inserted into her forehead but has scruples about Lang’s unorthodox request of the couple, given her belief that consent is a requirement. These ardent purveyors of radical kink have taken the rebellion of Saul’s body and made theater of it, even as it continues trying to kill him.

Full credits

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition) Distribution: Neon Production companies: Robert Lantos Production, in association with Argonauts Productions, Crave, CBC Films, ERT, Rocket Science Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman, Welket Bungué, Don McKellar, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Tanaya Beatty, Nadia Litz, Lihi Kornowski, Denise Capezza Director-screenwriter: David Cronenberg Producers: Robert Lantos, Panos Paphadzis, Steve Solomos Executive producers: Joe Iacono,Aida Tannyan, Peter Touche, Christelle Conan, Tom Quinn,Jeff Deutchman, Christian Parkes, Thorsten Schumacher Director of photography: Douglas Koch Production designer: Carol Spier Costume designer: Mayou Trikerioti Music: Howard Shore Editor: Christopher Donaldson Casting: Deirdre Bowen Sales: Rocket Science

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‘Crimes of the Future’: David Cronenberg Returns to His Sexy, Sticky Body-Horror Past

By David Fear

A man lies sleeping in his bed, tossing and turning. Well, “bed” doesn’t quite describe it: more like an organic cocoon cleaved in half, suspended from the ceiling by stringy, sinewy tentacles. The gent squirming around inside this pituitary gland-like pod is haggard but handsome, silver-maned, eyebrowless; if it weren’t for the matinee-idol jawline, you almost wouldn’t recognize that it’s Viggo Mortensen . “I think the bed needs new software,” he croaks to the female companion adjusting the rubbery extensions feeding into his hands. “It’s not anticipating my pain anymore.”

You may have no idea what is going on, but trust us — you know exactly where you’re at. It is less than five minutes into a movie “written and directed by David Cronenberg .” The fact they even had to put that credit onscreen at all feels like a mere formality.

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That’s the noirish engine thrumming beneath Crimes slick, viscous surface, and if you listen hard enough — or, as one supporting player in the movie does, literally cover your body with ears — you can detect the faint rumblings of an eco-thriller and a satirical swipe at today’s Celebrity Industrial Complex. Yet abandon all hope, ye who grasp for a plotline to hold on to here. The conversion of new cult members is not on the menu.

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The words “return to form” will likely get thrown around a lot, but the veteran filmmaker never lost his chops or his way; he just began poking around in different corners, nudging his way into psychological spaces rather than batshit biological ones. It’s a return to “a” form. Yet it’s hard not to gape in future-shock, awe and sheer wonder at the way he’s so deftly pirouetted right back into a sticky, sickly subgenre everyone thought he’s “evolved” out of. This is what the work of a visionary filmmaker looks like. Forget the new flesh. Long live the old Cronenberg.

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Crimes of the Future Reviews

Crimes of the Future may be better described as ‘echoes of the past,’ yet it is evocative enough to avoid at any stage being boring.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 17, 2023

Diverting without ever feeling essential, Crimes Of The Future is David Cronenberg treading water. It’s competently made and good to look at, but it lacks the weight or the shock factor of his finer work.

In replicating buzz created around Crash, Crimes of the Future can't escape being compared to it. For all its outrage marketing, Crimes of the Future doesn't live up to its hype.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Aug 9, 2023

It doesn’t quite make it as classic Cronenberg, but there’s enough sly humour, icy cold dialogue, and literally stomach-turning gore erotica to make it well worth a watch.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 1, 2023

Welcome to a world where humans create new organs, pain doesn’t exist, people eat plastic, and surgery is the new sex.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

A thematically rich film but with a surface level approach that really only asks questions & intrigues you with these questions while dangling some answers…. But never truly going fully into the entire concept.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

The trouble with Crimes of the Future is that it feels like it’s missing its final twenty minutes. While it doesn’t have the most abrupt ending possible, there was so much left on the table that needed a complete follow-through.

Long live the new flesh, where the body is reality, both blood curdling and stimulating. Thank you, David Cronenberg!

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jul 19, 2023

Crimes of the Future doesn’t offer the same opportunities of mid-2000s highlights like ‘A History of Violence’ and ‘Eastern Promises,’ but Mortensen balances the ridiculous and the sublime like few others.

Full Review | Jun 13, 2023

As far as comparisons to the two other Cronenberg films I think are similar, "Crash" and "eXistenZ," I think this is inferior in terms of quality and budget. The budgetary issues show up mostly in terms of low-rent sets and other production compromises.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Jan 27, 2023

“Surgery is the new sex”

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 17, 2023

Welcome back to body horror, David Cronenberg. We’ve missed you. And sure, you can bring Viggo Mortensen along.

Full Review | Jan 13, 2023

It’s not even a little surprising that David Cronenberg wrote the screenplay for Crimes of the Future twenty years ago and didn’t change a thing in bringing his vision to life in 2022.

Full Review | Original Score: 8.5/10 | Jan 3, 2023

David Cronenberg’s CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is a work of such exquisite horror and refined subtlety that it is pure sex. It is funny, trenchant, and so far ahead of most directors with its musing on the nexus of art, pain, sexuality, and politics.

Full Review | Dec 28, 2022

Cronenberg finds new entry points into these themes, making fresh incisions that feel distinctly modern. Crimes of the Future is not a carbon copy of its director’s greatest hits. It’s a manifesto.

Full Review | Dec 27, 2022

Crimes of the Future literally is not for the faint of heart. Were it has some amazing imaginary, very heavy artist suggestion and design, and some great performances from the whole cast; this is not a film to watch out of enjoyment or entertainment.

Full Review | Original Score: 8.5/10 | Dec 26, 2022

Crimes of the Future dissects a compelling cross section of Cronenberg’s body of work.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Dec 4, 2022

Cronenberg's style [is] a finely honed, mysterious ability to make medium-shot coverage of characters talking on chiaroscuro-shaded stage builds weirdly entrancing.

Full Review | Nov 21, 2022

No one makes movies like Cronenberg, and Crime of The Future may just be the most Cronbergien Cronenberg to ever Cronenberg.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Nov 2, 2022

To mark a work as a requiem is equivalent to burying an artist, but with Cronenberg one knows that the limits between the dead and the living, between the rotten and the germinal, are much more porous.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Oct 30, 2022

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‘Crimes of the Future’ Review: David Cronenberg’s Beguiling Dream-Noir Finds Hope from Within

David ehrlich.

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Watching David Cronenberg ’s beguiling new dream-noir — a twilight vision of tomorrow in which the next phase of human evolution is considered, at least by some privately self-conflicted bureaucrats, as a punishable insurrection against the very nature of humanity itself — I couldn’t help but think about the current plague of extremist politicians who are using their static interpretation of a 235-year-old document as justification to dictate what happens inside living people.

Abortion might seem like a counterintuitive analogue for a story that argues the need to let nature run its course, but “ Crimes of the Future ” is nothing if not a film about the barbaric futility of trying to police new flesh with old principles. Our bodies interpret the world that our brains have created for them to inhabit, and anyone too stubborn or scared to hear what they report back probably doesn’t have the stomach to survive whatever might be waiting for us on the other side of the horizon.

Whether you have the stomach to survive “Crimes of the Future” would seem to be a more complicated matter. At a time when holy shit, you have to see this insanity has become the fastest shortcut for arthouse fare to get around the always-suffocating layers of superhero movie hype, it was inevitable that Cronenberg’s first movie since “Maps to the Stars” would be positioned as some kind of sick endurance test that found him revisiting the familiar preoccupations of body horror classics like “Dead Ringers” and “The Fly” so that he could combine all of their gnarliest moments into a career-spanning orgy of squelching latex. The tone of the press coverage leading up to the film’s Cannes premiere was basically “any upstart auteur can fuck a car, but only OG daddy Cronenberg can make love to it.” The director himself even suggested that people would start walking out within the first five minutes.

What Cronenberg neglected to specify is that those imagined audience members — as implausible as the crowds who supposedly fled in panic when the Lumière brothers aimed a train at them — would be stampeding up the aisles in response to tragedy, and not gore.

Don’t get me wrong, “Crimes of the Future” is Cronenberg to the core, complete with its fair share of authorial flourishes (the moaning organic bed that its characters sleep in is a five-alarm nightmare unto itself) and slogans (“surgery is the new sex”). At the same time, however, this hazy and weirdly hopeful meditation on the macro-relationship between organic life and synthetic matter ties into his more wholly satisfying gross-out classics because of how it pushes beyond them.

Stoned and crepuscular in a way that evokes Jim Jarmusch’s “Only Lovers Left Alive” as much as it does any of Cronenberg’s own films, “Crimes of the Future” shifts the director’s lifelong focus on the mutability of flesh into a more philosophical gear, exchanging the semi-cautionary nature of his earlier work for a less aggressive study of transmutation. Its threadbare story might follow an arc similar to the likes of “Crash” and “Videodrome,” but the older Cronenberg now arrives at the end with a wiser sense of acceptance. Where those earlier movies staged hostile takeovers on the human body, the hypnotic “Crimes of the Future” finds the invasion coming from within — even in death, it hears the faint sounds of a harmony.

Back to those hypothetical walkouts. In a sequence whose dispassionate remove proves typical of the film that follows, “Crimes of the Future” begins with a young boy playing on the rocky shores outside his house, a capsized cruise ship jutting out from the water in the distance. It’s a fittingly oblique monument to an empty world gone sideways; a world so ravaged by unspecified (but likely climate-related) horrors that the only people who can stand it are the ones who’ve evolved beyond the ability to feel pain or pleasure. Some of them have evolved in other ways, too, as we infer when that same little boy eats a plastic garbage can for lunch. Others are frightened by that, as we infer when the boy’s mom promptly smothers him to death with a pillow.

This kind of thing probably isn’t unheard of in the age of Accelerated Evolution Syndrome, when people are developing so many new parts and behaviors that the government has created a National Organ Registry to keep track of them all (and maybe even nip the more promising mutations in the bud).

Performance artist Saul Tenser (played by a phlegmatic Viggo Mortensen ) is prolific enough to keep the NOR busy enough by himself. Kept alive by the aforementioned OrchiBed that reads his body and reacts to the new organs that keep growing inside of it, Saul has become a kind of unwell oracle for the evolutionary age. Context is hard to come by in Cronenberg’s elliptical script, but it seems as though Saul’s body — and his willingness to display its ever-changing contents — have made him the biggest celebrity his world has left.

Key to that is his creative partner and personal surgeon Caprice ( Léa Seydoux , shimmering full of wide-eyed wonder with every incision), who operates on Saul with a sarcophagus-like “SARK” machine as part of the public shows they create from his “designer cancer.” Bodies have never been more of a spectacle in a Cronenberg film, but “Crimes of the Future” is always quick to remind us that inner beauty is all the rage these days. And no one gets off on the new sex like Caprice. Whether her relationship with Saul ever inspires them to have the old sex is an open question, but reproduction is just one of the many different topics that movie titillates without touching.

Caprice isn’t the only one who’s inflamed by the sheer possibility that Saul’s body presents. Even Timlin, the sputtering mouse girl who works at the NOR, can’t help but let her freak flag fly at full mast every time Saul comes around (she’s played by an under-used but otherwise fantastic Kristen Stewart ). There are other players who orbit around Saul’s work, as well, namely the dead boy’s mysterious father (Scott Speedman), his unrepentant mother (an inspired Lihi Kornowski), and the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-like henchwomen who work for the SARK manufacturer and sometimes like to get naked together in the machine for kicks (Berst and Router are played by Tanaya Beatty and Nadia Litz, whose carefree performances evoke Mr. Kidd and Mr. Wint from “Diamonds Are Forever”).

Mostly, however, “Crimes of the Future” clings to Saul as he coughs around town cloaked under black Sith robes and waits for another revitalizing session in his freaky SARK machines. The conspiracy swirling around him — something about synthetic food and a more permanent evolutionary step — takes shape in the background, occasionally drifting into view like a cloud that can’t decide if it’s ever going to rain. The lackadaisical plot contributes to the film’s general sense of weightlessness, as if the story itself were uncertain of how to evolve from one scene to the next, and overwhelmed by the sheer wealth of possibilities. No matter, all of Cronenberg’s narcotized subplots and asides are “juicy with meaning,” to quote a line that Léa Seydoux delivers with more sizzle than anyone else on Earth possibly could.

At heart, the idea of custom bodies that can’t feel pain is just a playground for Cronenberg to riff on several variations of a theme, and “Crimes of the Future” opens up to you once you accept it as more of a thick vibe than a thin murder-mystery about the future of the human race. People are so horny to feel anything in the movie’s ultranumb world, and the various ways they search for sensation and new constructions of beauty — alone and together — continue to surprise until the bitter end.

So does the uncertain dynamic between Saul and Caprice, as Cronenberg finds a perversely moving sweetness in the way they face the future, alone and together, even as Saul’s body continues to turn against itself. Conflicted as he is about how to accommodate for the aggressive transformations of a body — and a world — that no longer seem habitable, there’s something beautiful about Saul’s continued pursuit of creativity in the shadow of death.

In true Cronenberg fashion, “Crimes of the Future” doesn’t fight for the old flesh at the expense of the new, nor cling to the protocols of yesterday in a futile and dehumanizing effort to stave off the possibilities of tomorrow. On the contrary, this sly but surprisingly warm gesture (from an artist in an aging body of his own) uses its premise to question the authorship of the human body, tap into the fear of losing it, and reach towards the seductive embrace of what comes next. At one point, Caprice drops to her knees, unzips the fly that runs across Saul’s stomach, and performs something akin to oral sex on the gaping wound she exposes below; as Saul himself might put it: “Art triumphs once again.”

“Crimes of the Future” premiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. NEON will release it in theaters on Friday, June 3.

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Crimes of the Future review – Cronenberg’s slightly creaky tribute​ ​to his own past

The body horror auteur returns to favourite themes, if not the peak of his powers, as Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart star in this playfully grisly tale of surgery as the new sex

D avid Cronenberg’s latest feature shares a title with an experimental film he made in 1970. In the wake of the original Crimes of the Future , Cronenberg would effectively invent, refine and then move on from “‘body horror” cinema, leaving a genre-defining canon of fantasy films ( Shivers, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome , The Fly ) that used the mutations of the flesh to discuss matters of life and death. Since 1988’s Dead Ringers , the Canadian auteur’s preoccupations have been more psychological (notwithstanding the mugwumps of Naked Lunch and the quirky genre return of eXistenZ ); from the sexual pathology of Crash , through the stagey Freud/Jung melodrama of A Dangerous Method to the biting Hollywood satire of Maps to the Stars .

This new Crimes of the Future (the script for which dates back to the late 90s) plays like a throwback to Cronenberg’s earliest outre genre outings and also a greatest hits compilation of familiar scrungy themes and fleshy sci-fi motifs from his back catalogue. It may not be vintage fare, but if anyone’s going to do a slightly creaky tribute to the films that once made Cronenberg an icon of thoughtful horror, it might as well be him.

From the cascadingly squishy tones of composer Howard Shore’s throbbing theme, which accompanies the blood-red “interior decor” of the opening titles, we find ourselves in a shipwrecked near future where the human body has been deprived of pain and is in revolt due to “accelerated evolution syndrome”. Viggo Mortensen , who brought real physical oomph to A History of Violence and Eastern Promises , is Saul Tenser, a performance artist whose body has become a hotbed of new organ growth – tumorous outcrops that are removed and displayed during public surgery by his partner, Caprice (Léa Seydoux). Each new organ is lovingly tattooed in situ by Caprice, creating a unique marking that can be filed with the National Organ Registry, established to keep track of anarchic human development. The registry is still a modest affair, run from shabby offices by the seemingly bureaucratic Wippet (Don McKellar) and the tremulously excitable Timlin (Kristen Stewart). “Surgery is sex, isn’t it?” whispers Timlin after becoming ecstatically aroused by one of Caprice and Saul’s performances. “The new sex.” Later, Saul will tell her: “I’m just not very good at the old sex.”

Meanwhile, in a tandem plot strand, a young boy we meet eating plastic in the film’s arresting first act becomes the subject of a proposed performance that would lead Saul and Caprice into uncharted territory. “Performance art is all consensual,” Caprice tells Lang (Scott Speedman), a radical who wants to show the world that it’s “time for human evolution to sync up with human technology – we’ve got to start feeding on our own industrial waste.”

Cronenberg has said that “fans will see key references to other scenes and moments from my other films”, and there’s a certain fun to be had watching Elliot Mantle’s dream of “beauty contests for the insides of bodies” from Dead Ringers come to fruition, or revisiting the “long live the new flesh” mantras of Videodrome . Diehard Cronenbergians will be relieved, too, that CGI effects have augmented rather than supplanted the gorgeously monstrous physical apparitions of yore, with regular production designer Carol Spier lending a familiar, distinctive edge to this still-tactile biomechanical world.

Yet for all its nostalgic pleasures and sardonic nods, this remains a footnote to the main body of Cronenberg’s work – a playful step back rather than an evolutionary leap forward. Yes, a few cinematic taboos are traversed, but we’re a long way from the days when Crash could become a headline-baiting cause célèbre that had the Daily Mail and Westminster council screaming for bans and boycotts. Here, it’s the slightly naff softcore elements that alarm, not least an irrelevant sapphic romp with a sci-fi sarcophagus that feels like an outtake from a straight-to-video 80s Roger Corman flick.

The ill-judged comedic elements don’t help, with Stewart’s (deliberately?) absurd staccato performance teetering awkwardly on the brink of breathless self-parody. By contrast, Mortensen and Seydoux play it deliciously straight, jumping through the well-rehearsed philosophical and physical hoops with elegant ease, conjuring a sense of yearning humanity that saves the production from descending into silliness… just about.

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Crimes of the Future Review

A movie like this should be way more disgusting..

Crimes of the Future will open in limited theaters on June 3, before expanding on June 10.

Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg’s first time behind the camera in eight years, is a deeply frustrating film, filled to the brim with big ideas captured in uninteresting fashion. While Cronenberg remains a conceptual powerhouse, returning to his days as a body horror maestro, his approach to one of his more thoughtful and intimate scripts leaves it wanting for passion, intrigue, and even disgust, the kind that might make the experience feel viscerally complicated, rather than distant and removed (though its performances are certainly engaging).

Set in the future where pain and infection have all but disappeared, and where select humans are blessed with the ability to feel pain as they inexplicably evolve new organs, the film follows a pair of performance artists, Caprice (Léa Seydoux) and Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), whose canvas is the human body, and whose M.O. involves Caprice publicly extracting Tenser’s new body parts in a form of ritualistic surgery. As broad premises go, it’s a fantastic idea, detailed through biomechanical designs that blend skin, bones, and machinery to create therapeutic contraptions reminiscent of elaborate torture devices. Things grow more complicated as Caprice and Tenser capture the attention of police and government bureaucrats concerned with the way human beings are changing — among them, Kristen Stewart as Timlin, a nervous, starstruck surgeon who logs and tattoos each new Tenser organ to mark a new stage of evolution — leading to questions of political allegiance in a rapidly changing world.

Cronenberg’s matter-of-fact approach to this premise yields an amusing absurdism, as his characters elaborate on political mechanics and the illicit nature of their art. Though as they go long on extolling the virtues (and vices) of this new world, the camera rarely captures the way they get swept up in their macabre passions and bodily modifications. It’s a keenly observant film, but one whose observations are about emotional impulse and response to physical stimuli; unfortunately, it rarely embodies that response.

On paper, it’s a work of stunning transhumanism, in which people discover brand new methods of arousal and expression, now that they possess effective carte blanche (physically, if not legally) to explore the inner contours of the human form; as Timlin says in the trailer, “surgery is the new sex.” It’s a line reminiscent of Cronenberg’s Videodrome , in which the mantra “long live the new flesh!” is repeated ad nauseum; in concept, Crimes of the Future feels like Videodrome and Cronenberg’s Crash smashed together — ideas of interwoven bodily and technological evolution colliding with self-destructive forms of desire — all wrapped in a film that shares its name (albeit little else) with the director’s very first feature from 1970. It’s Cronenberg reaching into his past in order to examine his own self-expression, with characters that question whether these new forms of creativity are born from impulse or intent (Cronenberg, in the process, places art itself in the volatile space between want and need), and whether creators themselves can be canvases. Is film the art, or is it merely a medium for the real art — i.e. the artist?

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The question of where the idea “art” truly lies — whether in the physical realm, or in somewhere beneath the flesh, as something we ingest, regurgitate, and excise as easily as bodily fluid — is as poignant as anything sci-fi body horror has ever asked, but in Crimes of the Future, the question so rarely goes beyond spoken words. Before the film lays its cards on the table, and presents its most esoteric ideas about the overlap between the synthetic and the biological, Cronenberg creates intrigue through still, clean compositions, and tableaus that both merge and separate characters from their surroundings. For all his wonderfully messed up cinematic ideas, he doesn’t get nearly enough credit as a precise visualist — but this measured formalism ends up a detriment whenever Cronenberg’s “new sex” (and his new “new flesh”) become the central focus.

It’s somewhat dissatisfying to watch a film whose wild ideas of sexual exploration, and self-exploration, are so plain and so viciously dulled, as if the only desired emotional responses to them are either disgust or lack thereof. The actors all try their damnedest, both to embody Cronenberg’s ideas (the slowly mutating Mortensen, for instance, delivers each line like a man about to hack up his own lungs) and to capture the sense of twisted allure so clearly underlying the story: the conflict between physical and emotional, and the few volatile moments where they align. But this time around, Cronenberg seems to have little interest in meaningfully exploring the many things discussed in the dialogue, from the nature of the body as a vessel for ideas, or the evolution of sexuality in ways that threaten establishment. The characters are all having a much more interesting time dissecting these ideas than the camera has dissecting their physical and emotional selves, so the result feels less like watching a Cronenberg classic in the making, and more like watching other people describe one.

Despite having wonderfully twisted ideas (and great performances to match them), Crimes of the Future isn’t the triumphant return David Cronenberg fans might have hoped for. Set in a world where the disappearance of pain has led to gory new performance art, the film presents imaginative questions about expression and sexuality, but mostly asks them in words, rather than exploring them cinematically.

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Crimes Of The Future Review

Crimes Of The Future

In May, when it played at Cannes, Crimes Of The Future was met with a quivering river of walk-outs, but also a six-minute standing ovation. Even in the fickle hysteria of Cannes, it was obvious David Cronenberg ’s latest would prove divisive. With its slurpy autopsies and opulent wound-licking, this is not a film to watch munching a hotdog, or God forbid a burrito, but what did those Cannes walk-outers expect? Objecting to Cronenberg being transgressive is like complaining Michael Bay films have too many explodo-booms. Provocative is what he does.

This, his first horror since 1999’s eXistenZ , is being hailed as a comeback of sorts, but he never really washed his hands of the genre. His first novel, Consumed , was published in 2014 and slithered with cannibals and flesh-nesting insects. And besides, Crimes Of The Future was originally scheduled for a 2006 release, then titled ‘Painkiller’ and starring Ralph Fiennes. Which begs the question: what prompted Cronenberg to revive it?

Crimes Of The Future is a movie with a lot on its mind. Cronenberg is 79 now and the film raises questions, not only about mortality, but the future of mankind itself. From Scanners ’ mutant psychics to The Fly ’s metamorphosis, evolution is the pumping heart of Cronenberg’s body horrors. In Crimes Of The Future , he takes the concept to new nihilistic extremes. Set in a decrepit, polluted techno-future, humans have evolved into an unfeeling, pain-free species, immune to trauma and disease. The exception appears to be Viggo Mortensen ’s performance artist Saul Tenser: a living, coughing factory of functionless body organs whose tumours are tattooed and extracted by his partner ( Léa Seydoux ) for an audience of horny voyeurs. Only Cronenberg could make something so shocking appear decadently perverse: the live autopsies are styled like the orgy in Eyes Wide Shut crossed with a Toby Carvery, and feel both alien and weirdly familiar. It’s the same insurgent erotica of Rabid , Dead Ringers and Crash .

Those scenes are the first of many nostalgic call-backs to the director’s past horrors. Videodrome ’s analogue TVs get a cameo; Tenser’s bug-like ‘OrchidBed’ and xenomorphic ‘BreakFaster chair’ look like organic offcuts from eXistenZ . But it doesn’t stop there. Devotees of the auteur will be playing Cronen-bingo here. There’s the aloof, surgical gaze. The graphic, shivering gore. The roll-call of pulpy names (hello, Lang Dotrice, Dani Router and, surely the winner, Brent Boss).

This is where the film may prove divisive: not in the shock and gore, but its sparse, dramatic drive.

And, of course, there’s the stiff, sterile line-readings. For non-converts, this will take some adjusting to. Early on, the dialogue is so prescriptive it sounds like the cast are reading not a script but an instruction manual (the detached tone eventually makes sense: in a future without pain, how else would people speak other than in a spooky, anaesthetised drone?).

So far, so Cronenbergy. There are even some of his trademark black laughs (when Tenser’s invited to an inner-beauty pageant, it’s suggested he enters ‘Best Original Organ With No Known Function’). Mostly, the mood is one of hypnotic doom: heavy-legged, fatigued and feverish. The director is a genre in himself, but Crimes Of The Future identifies as a noir. It’s in the swelling paranoia of Howard Shore’s score. It’s in the peeled, blistered interiors, as ruined as Chernobyl. And it’s in Mortensen’s stony, muted performance. Cowled like Death in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal , groaning dialogue between furball coughs, Tenser slowly unpeels Crimes ’ conspiracy of a new plastic-eating species with the detached curiosity of a private eye.

This is where the film may prove divisive: not in the shock and gore, but its sparse, dramatic drive. Cronenberg is so consumed by the horror of us blindly walking into an eco-apocalypse he abandons plot for brooding. All doom. Little suspense.

Does that make the film any less impactful? Weirdly, no. Cronenberg is the Sandman of horror cinema: his nightmare images find an insidious way of worming into the subconscious. Crimes Of The Future is best approached not only with caution, but patience. Slowly, silently, like leaking gas, the film creeps up on you, and you wake up to what a tragic, devastating vision this is. Much of that is down to its haunting closing shot: is Tenser’s smile one of ecstatic hope or destructive acceptance? The future of mankind seems to hangs on his lips, ambiguous and unspoken. If this is Cronenberg’s swansong, as the mournful tone seems to suggest, his final body horror burrows deep, not under the flesh, but in the mind.

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David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future could double as an elegy to the entertainment industry itself.

The gray-haired, cloak-wearing protagonist of David Cronenberg’s new science-fiction film, Crimes of the Future , is a very particular sort of conceptual artist. Saul Tenser (played by Viggo Mortensen) sleeps in a bizarre contraption that looks like a spiky womb, speaks with the cadence of someone being strangled, and is constantly growing new organs, which his partner, Caprice (Léa Seydoux), surgically removes from his body for a live audience. The primary question that vexes him is not how to survive his curious condition, but one that has probably crossed the mind of every artist—whether he’s losing his edge.

Crimes of the Future is the first film from the Canadian writer and director Cronenberg in eight years. It’s also his first major venture into sci-fi and horror since Existenz came out in 1999, around the same time he actually wrote Crimes . At that point in his career, he was pushing against just about every boundary he could find in those genres, but his recent output has been more grounded in tone. In his return to familiar territory, Cronenberg ruminates on the ways technology can change the very meaning of being human. This time, he filters those cerebral themes through the story of an aging legend who seems unsure if his art still has the capacity to shock.

Despite the parallels between the director and his subject, this film is not Cronenberg’s swan song—the screenplay is roughly two decades old, after all, and he already has another project in the works. But Crimes of the Future has an elegiac whiff to it nonetheless. Cronenberg is 79 years old and just took his longest break between films ever. And Crimes shares a name with one of his earliest movies . Cronenberg is at least winking at the audience about his career coming full circle, and in casting one of his most reliable collaborators, Mortensen, he’s found a wonderful onscreen analogue.

Crimes of the Future ’s murky dystopia is set in a depopulated world ravaged by unspecified climate disasters, where humanity has evolved past the ability to feel pain. Amateur surgery has consequently become an artistic movement. People gather in concrete basements to watch bodies opened up and exotic organs removed, in a discordant echo of Victorian surgery theaters . Saul and Caprice, who are both performance partners and lovers, are masters of the form, but their romantic and creative spark may be vanishing—there are, of course, only so many weird internal appendages you can cut out before the routine starts to feel corny.

Read: A new dystopian thriller that will twist your stomach and your brain

Mortensen’s performance is stripped of all his natural charisma. Saul stalks around in a herky-jerky manner that matches his throttled voice, his body endlessly tormented by the new things it’s growing. Only his sleeping husk (dubbed an OrchidBed) and automated feeding chair seem to give him any peace at all. The character would feel mannered if Mortensen’s work weren’t so incredibly tender. Seydoux’s contribution is every bit as subtle, although her character’s desires are more ambitious; she wants to care for Saul but yearns to push the boundaries of the surgical work they’ve done together.

For a movie about gory surgeries serving as the only entertainment of a ruined Earth, Crimes of the Future is surprisingly lighthearted. It’s shot through with even more mordant humor than Cronenberg’s last film, Maps to the Stars . A viewer expecting the intense viscera of the director’s earlier bloody classics, such as Videodrome and Scanners , may come away disappointed. Much of the action unfolds in ruminative dialogue, during which Saul and Caprice wonder at their path forward in the world. Or they bicker with supporting characters, such as the mousy, earnest Timlin (Kristen Stewart) and the busybody Wippet (Don McKellar), two bureaucrats who record logs of unusual organs to try to chart humanity’s evolutionary journey.

Those eager, if persnickety characters seemingly represent the audience Cronenberg is wearily still looking to satisfy, even as he ponders the entertainment industry’s bleak horizons. One of the film’s nastier moments is its opening scene, in which a little boy takes bites out of a plastic garbage can. While Saul is busy growing organs, another subgroup has emerged that can eat only artificial matter. Saul is drawn to these folk, whom much of society scorns as monsters but whom he views as perhaps our species’ eventual final form. If Timlin and Wippet are nagging pencil pushers, the garbage-consuming creatures are a newer audience Saul and Cronenberg can barely understand, a true hybridization of our blood-and-guts past with a fully artificial future.

Still, Cronenberg isn’t too worried about making definitive statements on mankind’s devolution. Instead, he’s crafted a peculiar little requiem for outsider art, a peep into a world where even the strangest conceits can become blasé. It’s both a nightmare and a wan farce, the kind of tonal blend that only Cronenberg could create, and despite his cynicism about what awaits us, I hope he never stops thinking ahead.

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘Crimes of the Future’ is meant to shock. Instead, it’s just tedious.

Filmmaker david cronenberg returns to that no man’s land between science fiction, body horror and social commentary.

Don’t eat the purple candy bars.

That might be the most lucid takeaway from “Crimes of the Future,” David Cronenberg’s latest provocation that takes an intriguing premise only to muddle it up within a tedious story, equally tiresome characters, the director’s fetishistic go-tos, self-conscious opacity and blunt obviousness.

Those last two don’t make for a winning combination, even when it comes by way of Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux, who never flag in their commitment in a movie that rivals Lars von Trier at his cruelest and most voyeuristic. Mortensen gags, hacks and coughs his way through his performance as Saul Tenser, a performance artist whose body has begun to create strange, never-before-seen tumors; his partner Caprice (Seydoux) removes them in public surgeries that are the toast of the gallery-hopping set.

They resemble the mentalists in “ Nightmare Alley ,” only here Cronenberg is imagining the near future, when public surgeries are the norm, people’s threshold for pain has virtually disappeared, and the body has taken on increasingly abstract contours as a site of suffering, self-expression, experimentation and, as one character puts it, “evolutionary derangement.”

With “Crimes of the Future,” Cronenberg returns to territory he’s visited before, that discomfiting no man’s land between science fiction, body horror, social commentary, and good ol’ sex and death. Viewers familiar with his adaptation of “ The Fly ,” as well as “ Dead Ringers ” and “ Crash ,” will recognize the same fascination with grotesque physical transformation, menacing surgical instruments and heavy machinery. Saul’s therapy includes sleeping in a hammock-like womb programmed to anticipate his pain; he eats in a contraption resembling a robotic exoskeleton. When Caprice operates on him, she deploys remote scalpels with a biomorphic-looking device that she fingers caressingly just under her heaving bodice; she looks like a modern-day Elsa Lanchester channeling the bride of Frankenstein for a new, more cynical age.

With its outré images and pulsating shots of human viscera, “Crimes of the Future” is clearly meant to shock, as well as reference very real anxieties about technology, genetics and environmental degradation. But as the convoluted plot wears on, Cronenberg’s transgressive kink looks more and more played out. He develops an irritating habit of explaining his symbolism through characters who spend a lot of time spouting dialogue that’s expository without illuminating much.

Kristen Stewart plays Timlin, a bureaucrat whose interest in cataloguing Saul’s mutations gives way to a doe-eyed crush; in a squirrelly, fey performance, she follows him like a bobby-soxer chasing after a pop idol. “Surgery is the new sex,” she says excitedly in her breathless whisper — just in case the idea hadn’t penetrated thoroughly, even literally, over the past several minutes.

One of the titular crimes of Cronenberg’s tableau of horrors occurs in the film’s opening scene, a set piece of ruthlessness, anguish and sheer oddity. That episode winds up coming full circle to involve Saul and Caprice in a stunt that will put their competitors (a dervish-dancing man who has sprouted multiple ears; a woman who mutilates herself for the delectation of the elite) to shame. That climactic sequence feels shamelessly opportunistic yet undeniably timely, at a cultural moment when shame seems to be in its own state of evolutionary derangement — or disappearance.

Inside “Crimes of the Future” is a movie fighting to get out, in order to share valuable ideas about that extinction event. But it remains trapped in a hermetic, tendentious womb of its own.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong disturbing violent content and grisly images, graphic nudity and some coarse language. 107 minutes.

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Cannes review: David Cronenberg's glossy, inscrutable Crimes of the Future skates on style

Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart go organ-hunting, but fail to find a plot.

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

If he wasn't a filmmaker, David Cronenberg probably should have been a sculptor, or a surgeon. The director's enduring fascination with the squish and viscera of modern life, his urge to explore the outer limits of organic shapes and forms, informs nearly all his movies — from '80s arthouse curiosities like Scanners and Videodrome to the early-2000s career apex of A History of Violence and Eastern Promises .

Crimes of the Future (which premiered last night at the Cannes Film Festival, and arrives in theaters June 3) sometimes feels like a Cronenberg Greatest Hits, at least aesthetically; so loaded does it it come with his signature themes and gooey, seemingly hand-crafted contours. It also has his longtime muse-collaborator Viggo Mortenson , and two lovely and extremely game female movie stars, Kristen Stewart and Léa Seydoux , to execute his vision. What it doesn't appear overly concerned with at any point is a linear plot, or a larger sense of what exactly the director wants to say about the future that we don't already know.

Mortensen is Saul Tenser, a performance artist living in some grim unspecified post-now whose anatomy, as it were, is the art: a constantly self-modifying vessel that seems to be mutating at an accelerated pace, producing new unknowable organs overnight. Seydoux ( No Time to Die , The French Dispatch ) is his personal and professional partner, a former trauma surgeon who has pivoted to working the underground showcases — they look like fight clubs, but onlookers hover and chatter like guests at an Art Basel cocktail party — where people gather to witness the outré novelty of what anomalous bodies like Saul's can produce.

Or as Stewart's excitable Timlin puts it, "Surgery is the new sex." Timlin is one of two employees at the National Organ Registry, a back-alley operation that seems to function just outside some dusty, forgotten corner of bureaucracy. (The film was shot on location in Athens, Greece, and the ancient patina of its cracked-plaster walls and abandoned boatyards feels real). She's an odd bird, both tremulous and aroused by the possibilities of a "human evolution [that] is uncontrolled, insurrectional." Though maybe not as invested as a man named Lang Daughtery, a grieving father and rebel leader whose urgent proselytizing for some sort of soylent bar — it's not green but a dense, grape-y purple — hints at the Darwinian sea change already in motion.

Ahead of Crimes ' Cannes premiere, Cronenberg announced , with some self-importance, that he expected walkouts within the first five minutes. (To be fair, it wouldn't be the first time; Crash , his notorious dip into auto-erotica, famously inspired more than a few dramatic exits when it bowed at the festival in 1996). In that same interview , he also revealed that he penned this particular script 20 years ago, which may explain the lag in his thinking: The festival that last year gave its ultimate prize, the Palme d'Or , to Julia Ducournau's Titane — a movie that arguably wouldn't even exist without Crash — seems unlikely to clutch its pearls over the mild provocations here. (Though there is no shortage of fleshy violations, full-frontal nudity, and at least one case of filicide; Greek tragedy, indeed).

Aside from a few neat visual tricks — a chair seemingly made of rubberized bones, a writhing dancer dotted with real human ears like a walking Duchamp punchline — the film unfurls mostly in shadows and corners, and so do its characters' inner lives. There's not much to grab onto logic-wise, because so little is revealed. (A story thread involving an offbeat detective mostly dissipates, as does one with a pair of comely, murderous machinists who nevertheless find the time to lose all their clothes before they go.) That leaves Cronenberg's gifted cast to pile intrigue and emotion on a mostly blank page: an arty indulgence pinging between visceral body horror and neo-noir thriller, and landing somewhere inscrutable in between. Grade: C+

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Crimes of the future, common sense media reviewers.

Sex, gore in creepy, brilliant Cronenberg body-horror pic.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Makes a strong commentary on humans' tendency to d

Characters are interesting and intelligent but not

One character of color appears in a relatively sma

A parent smothers a child with a pillow; dead (nak

Full-frontal female nudity. Two people lying naked

Infrequent use of "f--k," "s--t," "c--t," "ass," "

Background drinking at party.

Parents need to know that Crimes of the Future is a sci-fi body-horror movie by David Cronenberg; it's a companion piece to some of his 1980s and '90s classics. Newcomers to Cronenberg's universe will likely be puzzled, but fans will be swept away by its creepy, unsettling imagery and ideas. Violence includes…

Positive Messages

Makes a strong commentary on humans' tendency to disrespect our planet. Other themes related to evolution and bodies are discussed in an intelligent manner, letting viewers ponder them in depth.

Positive Role Models

Characters are interesting and intelligent but not admirable. They're mostly just surviving in a harsh world.

Diverse Representations

One character of color appears in a relatively small role. At least two strong, intelligent women have agency and control their own destinies.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

A parent smothers a child with a pillow; dead (naked) body shown. Characters are murdered with power drills to the temple, resulting in blood spurts and bloody wounds. Surgery sequences, characters slicing into flesh, poking tubes in, etc. Interior organs seen. Characters cut each other with knives, performing "surgery" on each other (sometimes with "squishy" sounds). Characters with mutilated flesh. Bleeding cuts. Character vomiting blue stuff, choking, dying. Lots of creepy, unsettling imagery.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Full-frontal female nudity. Two people lying naked together (presumed sex). One character sensually licks another's surgery wound. Kissing. Flirting. Sex-related dialogue.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Infrequent use of "f--k," "s--t," "c--t," "ass," "d--k," "oh my God."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Crimes of the Future is a sci-fi body-horror movie by David Cronenberg ; it's a companion piece to some of his 1980s and '90s classics. Newcomers to Cronenberg's universe will likely be puzzled, but fans will be swept away by its creepy, unsettling imagery and ideas. Violence includes characters being murdered by power drills (with blood spurts), a child being smothered by his mother, surgery sequences with internal organs and bleeding cuts, mutilated flesh, vomiting, unsettling imagery and sounds, and more. Three women appear fully naked, two characters are shown lying naked together (sex is presumed), one character licks another's surgery wound, and there's kissing, flirting, and sex-related dialogue. Language is infrequent but includes "f--k," "d--k," and "oh my God." There's background drinking at a party. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Community Reviews

• Parents say (1)
• Kids say (1)

Based on 1 parent review

What's the Story?

In CRIMES OF THE FUTURE, humans have begun rapidly evolving in strange new ways, including losing the ability to feel pain. People have even started performing surgeries on one another. Performance artist Saul Tenser ( Viggo Mortensen ) regularly grows new, unidentified organs, and his partner, Caprice ( Léa Seydoux ), surgically removes them in public in front of a crowd of onlookers. Saul and Caprice are approached by Wippet ( Don McKellar ) and Timlin ( Kristen Stewart ), of the National Organ Registry, who want to learn more about Saul's condition. Meanwhile, a small boy who can eat and digest plastic is murdered by his mother, who considers him a monster. The boy's father ( Scott Speedman ) asks Saul whether he and Caprice will perform a public autopsy on the boy's body, in the hope of uncovering another key to the secrets of evolution.

Is It Any Good?

While non-fans may be put off, those in the David Cronenberg club will be transported by this return to form, an exceedingly unusual but brilliant meditation on human bodies and passing time. Since his debut in 1969, Cronenberg has focused largely on the strange marriage of human-made technology and nature-made flesh, in masterworks like Videodrome , Dead Ringers , and Crash . After his 1999 eXistenZ , he began making less horror-centric and more mature efforts. Crimes of the Future is a surprising companion piece to his earlier body-horror movies, both complementing them and moving ahead. Without giving away the story's best twist, this movie contains Cronenberg's sharpest commentary on the human-led destruction of our own natural habitat.

That's not to say that Crimes of the Future is a downer. It constantly shocks and surprises with Cronenbergian inventions like a peculiar hanging bed shaped like a huge bug, designed to shift and adjust to help the user sleep better. (There's also a creepy "eating chair," supposedly designed with a similar intent.) But the movie's main focus is the concept of evolution, fascinating in all its emotional, biological layers. As bodies change, humans find ways of adapting, asserting control. As Timlin points out, surgery has become the new sex, and characters mutilate and manipulate their own flesh to express their inner beauty. Ever the master filmmaker, Cronenberg's cool, clinical filmmaking style perfectly expresses and visualizes his themes, and Howard Shore's thrumming score gives an edge of dread.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Crimes of the Future 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

How is sex depicted? What values are imparted? How has sex evolved in this future?

What are the upsides and downsides of this particular future? Is it a "dystopian" vision? Is there anything hopeful?

If your body could evolve in a way of your choosing, what would it be like?

What is "body horror "? What are some other examples of this genre?

Movie Details

• In theaters : June 3, 2022
• On DVD or streaming : August 9, 2022
• Cast : Viggo Mortensen , Lea Seydoux , Kristen Stewart
• Director : David Cronenberg
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Gay actors
• Studio : Neon
• Genre : Science Fiction
• Run time : 107 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong disturbing violent content and grisly images, graphic nudity and some language
• Last updated : May 3, 2023

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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David Cronenberg Makes an Indifferent Return to Body Horror in Crimes of the Future

Viggo Mortensen plays an artist with the magnificent name of Saul Tenser in Crimes of the Future , though whether he’s truly a creative force or just a source of material is a point of onscreen debate. Does the tendency to sprout new internal organs that are then removed in front of a live audience count as an art of will or a symptom of a rebelling body? Either way, Saul’s not alone in finding his form changing in ways he can’t predict. He and Caprice (Léa Seydoux), his partner professionally and in life, inhabit an emptied-out industrial future in which humanity has begun mutating and losing its ability to feel pain. Outré and amateur surgery has become the norm, practiced in bloody, blissed-out huddles on the street, and performance art has become the most vaunted and idolized of occupations. Caprice and Saul have become celebrities in their pared-down world for an act that involves Saul lying inside a modified sarcophagus originally intended for autopsies, and Caprice using its tools to remove the latest growth he’s sprouted as a symptom of the “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome” he suffers from.

Their burning eyes and ecstatic gasps broadcast what an admirer named Timlin (Kristen Stewart) will soon breathlessly insist: “Surgery is sex, isn’t it? Surgery is the new sex.” It’s an irresistible claim, one that could double as a tagline, but the truth is that it’s death, not sex, that looms over Crimes of the Future . The film marks David Cronenberg’s long-awaited return to the body-horror genre in which he’s been such a defining force, and from which he’s wandered over the last decade or so. But while Crimes of the Future , which shares a title and little else with an early entry in the filmmaker’s career, is filled with imagery that’s downright, well, Cronenbergian, from surreal medical equipment to devices that look organic in nature and extremely Freudian in their design, the filmmaker’s heart (and gonads) just isn’t into it. Seydoux may exude voluptuous sensuality, and Stewart may be performing a whispery, dystopian take on a sultry librarian, but the film itself has an aloof, clinical quality. What interests it is not the potential of our physical forms for pleasure and revulsion, but their inevitable failure.

When Caprice peers into Saul’s abdomen with what looks like a variation on a jeweler’s loupe and tells him about his latest organ, he murmurs, “I thought I was all tapped out, dried up.” It’s hard not to read the line as coming from Cronenberg directly. Crimes of the Future is the director’s first feature in eight years, since Maps to the Stars , and while he’s hardly been inactive since then, the film has an unmistakably late-career air. It feels exhausted, a sense mirrored in Mortensen’s performance of Saul as a man who seems to be dying in slow motion, constantly being cradled and jostled by H.R. Giger–esque devices that help him sleep and eat. Mortensen rasps his every line between dry-mouthed smacks and gurgles, a misophonic’s nightmare, and regards the world with the wry resignation of someone no longer able to move through it easily. Mortensen, burnished and silvery at 63, is better preserved than most of us mortals will be at any age, but he’s nevertheless an avatar of aging, someone whose body has been betraying him for long enough that he regards its changes with a removed curiosity more than anything else.

Crimes of the Future isn’t a terrible movie, but it’s so relentlessly moribund, barely staggering through the half-formed narrative giving it structure. There’s a dead child whose father, Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), lingers in Caprice and Saul’s orbit for reasons that are gradually revealed. There’s a National Organ Registry, overseen by Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin, which doesn’t officially exist yet but which nevertheless keeps track of changes in people like Saul. And there’s Berst (Tanaya Beatty) and Router (Nadia Litz), technicians working for the company responsible for the equipment Caprice and Saul use, and Welket Bungué as Cope, a detective lurking around the edges of the story. These elements barely come together in what may be ultimately a fantasy about humanity adapting to climate change instead of being eliminated by it, but that doesn’t actually feel very invested in our survival either way. The film only really comes alive when showing the high-concept performances from its main characters and their cohort, from a bitchily received dance number given by a man with ears all over his body to a work in which a beautiful woman disfigures her own face. Crimes of the Future otherwise remains aloof and indifferent to the people it puts onscreen, as though unable to bring itself to invest in their strange travails, much less to really put energy into their ability to provoke. Long live the new flesh — same as the old flesh.

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Flickering Myth

Geek Culture | Movies, TV, Comic Books & Video Games

Movie Review – Crimes of the Future (2022)

January 8, 2023 by Robert Kojder

Crimes of the Future , 2022.

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Don McKellar, Welket Bungué, Scott Speedman, Tanaya Beatty, Denise Capezza, Lihi Kornowski, Nadia Litz, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Yorgos Karamihos, Jason Bitter, and Ephie Kantza.

Humans adapt to a synthetic environment, with new transformations and mutations. With his partner Caprice, Saul Tenser, celebrity performance artist, publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances.

Legendary body horror provocateur writer/director David Cronenberg finds himself exploring familiar past themes in Crimes of the Future . In this supposedly not too distant future, surgery has become modern sex, human beings no longer feel pain, children digest plastic (and seemingly enjoy chomping down on it like digging into a bag of Ruffles), and the world has undergone a vague societal collapse.

Our window into this perplexingly mad new world is through Saul Tenser and his lover/assistant Caprice (Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux, respectively), an underground performance art duo that open up Saul’s body through various remote-controlled incisions and cuts, removing brand-new kinds of organs that his body has started growing. It’s also orgasmic for both of them. 

This new means of expressing bodily affection has also been around long enough for Saul to stop another character and admit to not being adequate at the classic version of sex. It’s also one of many lines that shows David Cronenberg is willing to embrace dark humor, whether it be another creative choice or acknowledging he is treading covered ground.

Crimes of the Future shockingly feels engineered as something much more playful despite its immediate bonkersness and initial makings of an upsetting plot. Even the opening five minutes, which feature an unforgivable act, are easier to swallow because the critical question is, “did that happen just because a child enjoys eating plastic?”

Before Crimes of the Future comes full circle to that plot point, David Cronenberg opts for world-building and central character work. However, the former feels lost in this nutty reality of human evolution and surgical sexual deviance. It’s disappointing that the specifics never get that deviant, either. There is a large stretch where David Cronenberg introduces new ideas for these characters and their motives to play off but at the expense of something genuinely engaging beyond the undeniably impressive makeup effects, production design, and finely calibrated acting.

If Saul and Caprice are artists searching for meaning for their organ shows, Crimes of the Future is also hunting for a more profound purpose. Pain becoming a foreign concept should pave the way for many terrific and gruesome ideas, but outside of a glimpse of homeless junkies cutting themselves at night hoping to feel something, even that feels underdeveloped.

Indeed, Crimes of the Future is a passive experience that’s more admired than enjoyed. Synthetic contraptions for sleeping and sitting carry several functions, such as jerking around the body, so the physiology for something like swallowing food is always perfect. Some of the new organs are prone to becoming cancerous. A pair of workers from the National Organ Registry (Don McKellar and Kristen Stewart) track Saul (who frequently covers themselves from head to toe when out and about, as if he is Dracula while grunting through most dialogue). Scott Speedman also plays the father of the plastic-eating child, which also gets mixed into the skeleton of a mystery here.

The good news is that this does grow into and climax with something controversial, a beguiling sequence of disassembly, for lack of a better term. However, the characters feel more flesh than fleshed out, with certain reveals and moments lacking in that same hypnotizing feeling. With a bit more context to this world or even more propulsive energy to some of the weirdest scenes and dynamics, this might feel less disjointed and more kinetic.

Still, when Saul is being opened up or allowing Caprice to make out with his wounds, or when a child faces dire consequences for being a weirdo-eating plastic, Crimes of the Future is devilishly realized with entrancing practical effects and gnarly makeup. But the story is difficult to digest. It is more an amalgamation of all things David Cronenberg than something genuinely compelling with something new to say, even after thinking about it.

If there are alien-reminiscent beds and chairs to help one sleep and eat better, Crimes of the Future needs something similar for easier consumption. Even if it doesn’t amount to much, it’s still weird and worthwhile and unmistakably David Cronenberg.

Flickering Myth Rating  – Film: ★ ★ ★  / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check  here  for new reviews, follow my  Twitter  or  Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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Movies | ‘crimes of the future’ review: viggo mortensen’s got some brand new organs. show time.

Léa Seydoux (top) and Viggo Mortensen star in David Cronenberg's "Crimes of the Future."

A futuristic performance artist (Viggo Mortensen, below) and his partner (Léa Seydoux) prepare to check exactly which new bodily organs lurk beneath the skin in filmmaker David Cronenberg's "Crimes of the Future."

A chillingly beautiful dare of a movie, David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” imagines a near-future much like the present, only colder and more feral.

Shot in Athens, largely at night, writer-director Cronenberg’s first feature since “ Maps to the Stars ” eight years ago gathers up a lifetime of personal obsessions in a story Cronenberg conceived late last century, and only now has gotten around to filming, the way no else could. Or would.

The title comes from an early experimental picture Cronenberg made in 1970, set in a skin clinic where horrible things have happened to patients who used a certain kind of cosmetic, unaware of its dangers. The threats in the new “Crimes of the Future,” which shares a general theme and a title with the previous one, are everything everywhere all at once.

Strange new worlds are being born inside the human body. The body politic in this arid near-future has become a literal body politic in revolt. More and more citizens here, in a time and place in which pain has been nearly entirely eradicated, are coming down with something called Accelerated Evolution Syndrome. This causes bodily organs to self-generate with unpredictable results.

And there’s money in those organs. Performance art “happenings” have emerged in underground salon settings, with the afflicted slicing themselves open to reveal their brand-new innards to the assembled audience. One of these performance artists is played by frequent Cronenberg collaborator Viggo Mortensen (“Eastern Promises,” “A History of Violence”). His character, Saul Tenser, works with his partner and sort-of lover Caprice (Léa Seydoux), a former trauma surgeon. Their world is one of singular trappings, including a podlike chair that senses pain, causing the arms of the chair to manipulate and soothe the body at hand, like an arthritic masseuse.

Tenser and Caprice catch the attention of the shadowy National Organ Registry, which catalogs new organs. (Cronenberg keeps the motives vague.) The registry’s apparently two-person staff is made up of Wippet (Don McKellar) and his associate, the twitchy, furtive Timlin. She is played by Kristen Stewart, sneakily hilarious as a true devotee of what Tenser is up to, namely: the most extreme and exotic form of “cutting” imaginable.

If that sounds tasteless, “Crimes of the Future” will surely be that to many, if only for its blech factor, roughly medium level by Cronenberg standards. He has done everything from “Scanners” to “The Fly” to “Crash,” refining his immaculate technique in different directions over the decades.

What makes “Crimes of the Future” work has everything to do with texture. The interiors and exteriors of Athens, especially at night, have been captured truly and well by Cronenberg’s design team. The blood-red and lava-orange opening credits set the mood of sinister allure. What Cronenberg has to say metaphorically about art and artists and, among other themes, environmental collapse, egged on by humans, does not add up to any conventional sense or shape.

That is not a flaw, merely a fact. The prologue, which leaves one particularly vulnerable character dead and a corpse up for grabs, establishes the stakes. Rhythmically “Crimes of the Future” maintains a rigorous sense of calm throughout, which can get a little pokey in some scenes. But Mortensen, Seydoux and especially Stewart invest fully, so some of us, anyway, can too.

“Crimes of the Future” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPAA rating: R (for strong disturbing violent content and grisly images, graphic nudity, and some language)

Running time: 1:47

How to watch: Premieres in theaters June 3

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

[email protected]

Twitter @phillipstribune

Big screen or home stream, takeout or dine-in, Tribune writers are here to steer you toward your next great experience. Sign up for your free weekly Eat. Watch. Do. newsletter here .

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‘Damaged’ Review: Samuel L. Jackson and Vincent Cassel Headline a Slick but Tepid Serial Killer Thriller

Wobbly material lets down TV veteran Terry McDonough’s first theatrical feature, an Edinburgh-set mystery that delights in its gruesome crime scenes.

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At their least, the myriad serial-killer movies that followed in the imitative wake of “Se7en” three decades ago have gotten the grisly part down, but find compelling suspense, atmospherics and original narrative ideas harder to come by. Such is certainly the case with “ Damaged ,” which serves up a considerable number of victims’ severed limbs, yet is likely to leave scant impression — scarring or otherwise — on the viewer. 

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Koji Steven Sakai, Capaldi and Paul Aniello’s script feels like an awkward compromise between competing visions, as well as somewhat inorganic multinational casting. While his performance is okay, frequently surrendering focus to better-known actors doesn’t lend Capaldi’s character enough heft or personality to center the film, as it seems meant to. Jackson is in enjoyably playful form at first, though later he’s saddled with more credulity-straining narrative baggage than he bothers to treat seriously. Cassel and particularly Dickie are underutilized, while the preliminary villains make a menacing impression the screenplay fails to flesh out much. (Even the story’s religious angles turn out to be a red herring.) Suspense is minimal in part because the murder victims are mostly only introduced to be offed — the film is less interested in their peril than lingering on the gory aftermaths. 

McDonough has directed a lot of quality series installments on both sides of the Atlantic over the last quarter-century, including “Better Call Saul,” “Breaking Bad” and “The Street.” This belated first theatrical feature gets the benefit of his slick professionalism, as well as that of his overqualified actors. But they can only do so much with material that feels cursorily sewn together from elements of prior, better genre exercises, and which finally collapses into explication-heavy twistiness that leaves any remaining believability behind. 

Nicely enough turned in all tech and design departments, “Damaged” is too efficiently handled to be dull, or even overtly bad — though viewers may find themselves rolling their eyes a bit after a while. But the overall lack of conviction reduces content that should be alarming and macabre to the status of an unmemorable time-killer. 

Reviewed online, April 7, 2024. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 97 MIN.

• Production: (U.K.-U.S.) A Liongate release of a Lionsgate, Grindstone Entertainment Group presentation, in association with Red Sea Media, Bondit Media Capital, Tartan Bridge Films of a High Five Films production. Producers: Paul Aniello, Gianni Capaldi, Roman Kopelevich. Executive producers: Barry Brooker, Stan Wertlieb, Roman Viaris, Greg Sinaiko, Luke Taylor, Matthew Helderman.
• Crew: Director: Terry McDonough. Screenplay: Koji Steven Sakai, Gianni Capaldi, Paul Aniello; story: Paul Aniello. Camera: Matthias Poetsch. Editors: Luis de la Madrid, Sean Albertson, Kurt Nishimura. Music: Andrea Ridolfi. 
• With: Samuel L. Jackson, Vincent Cassel, Gianni Capaldi, Laura Haddock, John Hannah, Kate Dickie, Brian McCardie.

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