David Cronenberg is back. After devoting eight years to the making of TV movies and Nike commercials, the writing of books (a 2014 novel called "Consumed," about high-end techno lust), and even acting (in the streaming terror series "Slasher"), the master of big-screen body horror has returned to the land of exploding heads and mutant flesh that birthed him — home, in other words.
Debuting at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Cronenberg's comeback feature, the grisly "Crimes of the Future," triggered a few audience walkouts (always a good sign) but was also rewarded with a seven-minute standing ovation (one minute more, if you buy these sorts of numbers, than the soon-to-be blockbuster "Top Gun: Maverick"). It seemed an auspicious kickoff.
So, what do we have here? Well, unlike the movies Cronenberg was making at the end of the last century ("Cosmopolis," "Eastern Promises," "A History of Violence"), "Crimes of the Future" once again embraces the ick factor that distinguished his celebrated 1980s work, pictures like "Scanners," "The Fly," and "Videodrome." If it doesn't rise to the level of those classics, that's partly because of budget restrictions (Cronenberg required the assistance of 10 different production companies to get the movie made and he still had to shoot it in Greece). But the film has a gratifyingly dank and hopeless atmosphere that whispers "Cronenberg" throughout.
The grim alterna-world he has scripted here is one in which human evolution has taken some alarming turns. Bodies now sprout strange new organs and appetites (the movie opens with a little boy biting hungrily into a plastic bucket) and "desktop surgery" has become a public entertainment. Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) is a celebrity on this grotesque scene, a man whose fertile gut brings forth a continual procession of new organs, some of them types never seen before. Saul is a performance artist, traveling the land with his lover/assistant Caprice (Lea Seydoux), a surgeon whose role in their act is to remove the latest of Saul's internal growths in front of appreciative audiences and then mark each of them in accordance with regulations imposed by the National Organ Registry.
As we join Saul and Caprice on their latest living-autopsy tour, they are being accompanied by two Registry agents, played by Kristen Stewart and Don McKellar. (Stewart isn't given much to do here, but she exudes a sense of near-carnal arousal in the presence of the viscera in which Saul and Caprice traffic that is inventively amusing.) Also lurking about are Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), a weird character who wants Saul to do an autopsy on his son; an investigating detective (Welket Bungue); and two equipment-maintenance ladies (Nadia Litz and Tanaya Beatty) whose main purpose is to get naked.
As you'd expect in a Cronenberg movie, "Crimes" offers some memorable imagery — skull-drilling, wound-sucking, slurpy intestinal manipulations and a dancing man whose body is covered with ancillary ears. But the story, resurrected from a 20-year-old script, is limp and unengaging, especially as it plays out in the movie's dull, underpopulated environments. It doesn't help that Mortensen and Seydoux are uncharacteristically subdued here, and that the whole picture is so starved of sensuality. Is surgery the new sex, as Stewart asserts at one point? Not quite.
Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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