In David Cronenberg’s latest, genetic mutations of the human body are both commonplace and an artistic goldmine. See the North with Canada’s Top Ten on January 26–29, 2023 at TIFF Bell Lightbox. For more, visit tiff.net/ctt.

Set in a dystopic future where biotechnology-based mutation is increasingly the norm and basic emotions are discomfiting anachronisms, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future shares obvious similarities with his body horror classics. The ostensible hero, notorious avant-garde performer Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), grows unique tumours, which his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) excises in live performances. His outlaw status and repugnant physical deterioration suggest a familiar trajectory, echoing the accelerated decay and mutations of earlier protagonists like The Fly’s Seth Brundle. But unlike the outlaw figures of Cronenberg’s earlier films (who pursued their mad obsessions in private and functioned as allegorical artist figures), Tenser is a famous artist, and a boundary-pushing one. His function is to suffer for his audience, literally giving up pieces of his body for their enlightenment and, more significantly, their amusement ― an amusement which is heavily eroticized but can’t be separated from suffering, humiliation, and debasement.

In this particular version of the future, the only publicly acceptable and shared emotion is the perverse thrill Tenser’s performances provide, a thrill that demeans him and his audience. Here, the future itself is the crime, and it’s a future as desensitizing and sadistic as reality television or contemporary political discourse. (As an index of how different this is from other Cronenberg thrillers: there are serial killers running amok in this weird, disturbing landscape, but no one ― not even the cops ― seems to give a damn.) Fascinating and grotesque, shot with a kind of cool, repulsed animosity by Douglas Koch, Crimes of the Future is a piercing piece of Cronenbergian social criticism akin to Crash and Videodrome. The stellar cast includes Scott Speedman, Nadia Litz, Tanaya Beatty, and, as Tenser’s biggest fans, Don McKellar and Kristen Stewart, whose delirious, hilarious admiration is of a piece with their hatred of him.

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