by Robert Martin
“What do I think of the future? That I don’t have as much of it.”
As he approaches 80 years old, it’s apt that David Cronenberg returns to the screen after an 8-year gap with a film that feels like something of a return to his earlier work. As suggested in this quote from an interview with him on this special limited edition box set from Second Sight Films, time is running out. For him, and for all of us…
In a future where people no longer feel pain, where disease is gone and where humanity has adapted to a synthetic environment, surgery is the new sex. And in a place where people are cutting each other just to feel anything, one couple has turned the new sex into art performance. Saul Tenser and his partner Caprice are at the forefront of an underground radical art movement, performing extractions of the new organs Tensor is able to grow for slavering audiences. But why can Tensor grow new organs? What is the human body turning into as it adapts to a synthetic world? And why should both the National Organ Registry and a group of radical evolutionists take such an interest in him?
Apart from, perhaps, his own son, could there be any other filmmaker thank Cronenberg at the helm of a film with such a storyline? Crimes of the Future is Cronenberg through and through. It’s elegant, slow, ridiculous and provocative and occasionally, thanks mainly to Léa Seydoux, emotional. It’s also the best-looking Cronenberg film since Crash, and it has a beautiful Howard Shore score.
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.
This release is rammed with special features, all beautifully presented in a limited edition case with a 120-page booklet and collectors’ cards. New audio commentary by the Canadian writer Caelum Vatnsdal (almost a Cronenberg character name, that one!) shows why he’s one of the foremost writers about the horror genre, and there are several interviews, most of which seem to have happened in Cannes on the morning of the film’s premiere. One with Cronenberg himself focusing on the film as a love story, one with Viggo Mortensen, with Seydoux and with Kristen Stewart, plus several others. A making-of and video essay examining Cronenberg’s fascination with the body are all interesting stuff. They’ve even thrown in The Death of David Cronenberg, a bizarre short in which the famed director comes face to face with his own death.
Overall, a package as good as the film. Which is good, if not brilliant.
Crimes of the Future is available on 4K UHD Blu-ray and DVD from September 11th.
