In the Amazon Prime subscription you can now stream David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. It’s a continuation of old excesses and an intelligent rethinking of his signature style.
Nightmare imagery and nauseating body horror are trademarks of infamous genre director David Cronenberg. His works such as The Fly or Videodrome are unforgettable, in which the Canadian, in addition to disturbing abysses, also intelligently reflects on the relationship between man and technology.
With Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg has returned to cinema in 2022 with his first feature film since 2014’s Maps to the Stars. If you haven’t yet seen the fantastic work, which caused a furor of scandal before its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, you can stream Crimes of the Future now on your Amazon Prime subscription.
Crimes of the Future celebrates the post-apocalypse with bizarre bodies and surgical sex
In his latest film, Cronenberg paints a picture of a decaying, post-apocalyptic future. Here, people can barely feel emotions like pain, with some uncontrollably growing new organs in their bodies.
The plot of Crimes of the Future revolves primarily around Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), who has developed a kind of performance art show out of these superfluous organs with his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux). In each of their performances, they are watched by the National Organ Registry, while a mysterious group that feeds on plastic wants to usher in the next stage of humanity.
Sounds like a pure David Cronenberg film, but nowhere near as shocking or provocative as it was made out to be in advance. Before the premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, the director himself said in an interview that he was sure people from the audience would leave the room within the first five minutes.
Behind the scandal is a smart sci-fi film about life after horror
Suddenly, Crimes of the Future was hyped up to scandal hype that would disgust its audience and have potential for panic attacks. Even though the sci-fi horror depicts grotesque bodies, lustful surgeries and bizarre acts almost elegantly, it is at the same time a very quiet, reduced film with a very high proportion of dialogue.
While Cronenberg has always been about recognizing chilling deformities and strange excesses as exciting new potential, Crimes of the Future is now an apt post-body horror film.
Crimes of the Future
After all the possibilities of transformations have been played out, the director now thinks about how a new human existence can emerge in the midst of all the nightmare images and bizarre manifestations. At the very end, Cronenberg finds a comforting final image for this.
