“Surgery is the new sex,” is the mantra is director David Cronenberg’s glorious return to body horror- Crimes of the Future. Set in a dystopian future of “accelerated evolution syndrome” where people have been developing unexplained new organs in their bodies.
Viggo Mortensen plays Saul Tenser, who is a legend for producing a myriad of weird new inner body anomalies. He turns it all into performance art, along with his beautiful partner Caprice (exquisite Lea Seydoux), where adoring fans watch them surgically remove the mutant organs. His discomfort afterwards forces him to sleep in a pulsating, organic contraption with tubes and moving desiccated arms to help ease his suffering.
There is also a renegade faction of revolutionaries led by Lang (Scott Speedman), who have reconfigured their bodies in order to consume plastic and the government wants Saul to infiltrate this subversive group.
One has to register these creepy new organs with the National Organ Registry led by Wippet (wonderful Don McKellar) and his skittishly weird assistant Timlin (Kristen Stewart)- who becomes erotically fascinated with Saul watching the automated blades cut into his body during his performance pieces.
Cronenberg visually creates a moss green, rusted-over, nightmare landscape and the movie’s strange tone echoes other Cronenberg films like Videodrome, Rabid, eXistenZ and especially Crash when Saul and Caprice ecstatically entwine naked in a monstrous automated machine that slices into their skin.
I cannot tell you what a joy this was to see in a theater. It’s a thrilling, dark vision. “Long live the new flesh.”
