David Cronenberg is one of those "love him or hate him" filmmakers. There's rarely any middle ground. I don't know if I consider myself a fan. I mean, sure he's the guy who gave us The Fly and The Brood, but I thought Scanners and Videodrome were underwhelming. Crimes of the Future is his first horror/sci-fi flick in two decades, and now I have an entirely new definition of underwhelming. Holy hell, was this a letdown. Boring, nonsensical, poorly acted, and incredibly forgettable. Easily his worst film and one that has me praying he goes back to oddball dramas and gangster films. Whatever he once had, he may have lost it.
I don't even know where to begin. I hate conceptual science fiction that just dumps the audience in the middle of a completely alien world with zero explanation of how we got there or how this world works. Cronenberg does that to us by showing us a world where somehow humanity evolved past the ability to feel pain and the development of new vestigial organs is either highly illegal or performance art. Not really sure. Our hero is Saul Tenser (Mortensen), a walking mutation who grows new, useless organs all the time and has his partner Caprice (Seydoux) cut them out for entertainment value. He's also an undercover agent for a pointless agency that monitors illegal organ growth. We basically follow these people around as they spout dialogue that might as well be in a foreign language and just do weird sexual shit with organs and organ flaps. There is no plot here. Just Cronenberg vomiting his deepest sexual desires onto the page with nobody having the balls to tell him it makes no sense. If you're a Cronenberg purist who wants to complete his filmography to get another notch in your director's belt, I get it. That's primarily why I saw it. But no casual film fan is ever going to want to watch a second of this. It definitely feels like a Cronenberg movie, what with how it handles the concept of "the flesh." But he's so much better than this, and I really hope his next venture is far more palatable. |