I Was Baffled By CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

 David Cronenberg made a funny career for himself, where he's destined to be forever known as the body horror guy despite not making all that much body horror. "Crimes Of The Future" is sold as kind of a back to roots picture by him - something akin to "Videodrome" or "The Fly", which along with "Crash" are probably his 3 most famous films still, despite them all being very old and except for "The Fly" not being all that popular when they released. His recent interest in abstract dramas and Viggo Mortensen thrillers will end up as his so-called forgotten era, I would think.

 I would certainly say this new film feels very "Videodrome"-y in its structure. Like "Videodrome", the movie is trying to work on at least 3 different levels. You have the gross out horror right on the surface. Here's the first spot where "Crimes Of The Future" feels good, but weird: this stuff is all more cool than horrifying. Viggo Mortensen and Lea Seydoux do surgery as performance art, because "surgery is the new sex". Cool, love it, I say as a veteran of disgusting horror movies. But frankly the movie stays on that degree of coolness. See, Viggo can grow new organs, and they get removed by having Seydoux cut him open and remove them. This is never really presented as anything but a neat looking piece of performance. I'm certainly not one to get picky about what is and is not "horror", but honestly I don't think that Cronenberg was particularly trying to make a horror film here. He thought up a creative conceit for his plot and went with it. That's fine, I enjoyed that, but the marketing of this movie (as a disgusting piece of gore for cretins) has massively oversold it.

 So what's the second level here? Well, there's a mystery happening in the background pertaining to a boy we see killed in the opening scene. This is a rare instance where I'll pop a spoiler warning, because I really do think it's masterful how much of the film's real plot is happening underneath the surface. So at different points in the film, we find out that 1) Viggo is far from the only person growing new organs out of nothing, 2) these new organs make plastic digestible, and 3) these people with plastic-digesting-organs have formed some sort of activist slash terrorist group to fight traditional humans, or just to have rights within human society, depending on your perspective. None of this is obvious until we're over an hour into a movie that only runs about 1:45, but there's more than enough pre-existing hints to make it make sense in hindsight. You're not saying "huh", you're saying "huh, so that's what was up with the candy bar that killed the guy an hour ago". This is the level where "Crimes Of The Future" really, really worked for me. It feels quite slow at times, and then it throws an absurd amount of shit at the audience, and by the end it all makes perfect sense and never feels overwhelming. I'll shout out 2018's Boots Riley satire "Sorry To Bother You" as the last movie I can think of that made a twisty plot this wild feel so natural. Every scene makes sense by the time the credits role. That's bananas given how few make sense while you watch it.

 

 Level 3... what in the world is this movie about? What is Cronenberg trying to say to us? This is the part where I was truly confused, and it's my own fault for trying to get ahead of the film. Before the mystery is revealed to the audience, it feels like a pretty straightforward metaphor for doing dumb things and destroying yourself for art. Viggo having his organs removed for performance art actually causes him a ton of pain and makes him kind of miserable, but he continues to do it for the art. You can tell this is a theme because Cronenberg has two characters explain it to the audience out loud at one of the "art shows" (the two women who do repairs on the surgery machine are a lot of fun as the comedy relief). It's a fine idea. It's 2022, the hustler economy loves selling self-mutilation (metaphorically) as entertainment, that's what "Nope" was about and it's the best horror movie of the summer. So make that self-mutilation disgustingly literal, people literally pay to watch other people get cut open, very nice. And by the time the plastic eaters enter the story, I would assume that Cronenberg is going into an environmental statement. We are poisoning ourselves because we love machines too much. The punchline there is the surgery on the plastic-stomached child, which is hideous and literally empty. Machines over nature make us all empty, that's a totally reasonable thing to make a movie about. And Then. And then the viewer will quickly learn that the emptiness was a set up by a shadowy government operation to hide the existence of people evolved to eat plastic, and that Viggo has changed his worldview to take the side of the plastic eaters, and I think the audience is supposed to too. Is this story now about embracing evolution and rejecting traditional biology? I honestly don't have a clue. I wouldn't be shocked if Cronenberg said the whole thing was a metaphor for transgender acceptance, although I think it's quite clunky if that's what's up. The one interview source I found suggests that Seydoux understood the "destroy yourself for art" part and rolled with that, which makes total sense to me, and Cronenberg said some weird nonsense about literal biological evolution. Sure, man.

 What else does the movie have going for it? Well, it's funny, in the kind of deadpan way you hope this sort of movie would be. Kristen Stewart is doing a bizarre jitter-stutter all throughout her performance, which is a lot of fun to watch, even if I wish she had a bigger role. The set design of the underground cave where Mortensen and Seydoux live is lovely. And it is truly unique - a genre flick that you can read philosophy into or not and enjoy it about the same, filled with slick CGI and the wildest premise of the year. I think that "Crimes of the Future" is certainly worth watching, and probably worth thinking about. I'm not totally sure if there's an answer anywhere in it, or if that answer is worth finding.