David Cronenberg belongs to that rarefied stratum of directors whose aesthetic could credibly be characterised as a genre unto itself. To this day, any filmmaker who wades into the slime and viscera of ‘body horror’ cannot evade one particular adjective: Cronenbergian. Yet since 1999’s eXistenZ, the director has been on sabbatical from his own icky brand, setting aside outré grotesquery in favour of more conventional (and conventionally legitimate) subject matter.

But it would seem that the ever-undulating “New Flesh” of Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986) couldn’t be suppressed indefinitely. To watch it find new form and new purpose in Crimes of the Future is beautiful, baffling, and exhilarating.

The time: the future. The place: who knows? Bodies are changing. Pain tolerance has skyrocketed, and people are carving each other up in the street for kicks. What’s more, certain individuals have been sprouting mysterious new organs. Or are they tumours? Performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) thinks so.

With the assistance of his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux), Tenser has been routinely removing his own mutant organs for the art world’s viewing pleasure. He sees it as an act of defiance in the face of a disobedient body, a sentiment that inflames the imagination of Timlin (Kristen Stewart), an eccentric bureaucrat from the shadowy National Organ Registry. Thus begins a labyrinthine (and possibly nonsensical) plot full of noirish skulduggery, twisted eroticism and plenty of yuck stuff.

If this all sounds ridiculous, it’s possible Cronenberg would agree. Despite a pervasive atmosphere of environmental collapse and societal breakdown, the film has a cheeky sense of its own absurdity. It’s outright funny at points, especially when the sublimely pervy Timlin is on screen.

Cronenberg has always been something of a covert surrealist, but the science-fictional justifications for his images, ideas and sensations have never felt quite so tenuous or incidental as they are here. Long-time admirers may find this shift frustrating, but there’s an undeniable singularity of vision – one that makes previous works seem diluted in comparison.

Crimes of the Future certainly isn’t Cronenberg for Beginners. It feels akin to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return (2017): both a career-spanning roundup of recurrent tics and fetishes; both the work of an elder statesman content in only referring to himself. But, as with The Return, this isn’t a straightforwardly backward-looking work. Cronenberg has expressed a certain distaste for the term ‘body horror’, and he’s always seemed conflicted about the radical shifts in human biology he presents.

While the strictures of genre have historically led him to err on the side of pessimism, Crimes of the Future leaves us on an optimistic note (albeit a cautious one). Here we find the “Baron of Blood” making a concerted effort to liberate his
anarchic bodies from their prior horror context. Consequently, Cronenberg’s latest feels more like a late-in-the-day course correction than a victory lap. It’s a self reflexive film, yes, but it isn’t self-congratulatory.

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