YNOT at the Movies

If you are not a surgeon, you will probably see cutting someone open as gruesome or barbaric, unless you are one of those well-dressed cocktail-sipping patrons during a performance art show in the writer-director David Cronenberg's new film "Crimes of the Future" (Canada/France/Greece/UK 2022 | 107 min.). This is going to be quite a challenging film for many who don't have the stomach to keep their eyes on the screen. However, no matter how much you might be disturbed by the film's visuals, you can't help but admire the filmmaker's bold vision and creative mind on his artistic interpretation about human evolution.

The unsettling sensation is provoked from the very beginning of the film, when a mother kills her own innocent looking young son. But that's certainly not the end for this young boy, and he will be part of the show by a performance art duo, Saul (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux) later.

In a dystopian future, humans have evolved biologically, although it's unclear exactly how. The environment they live in looks as filthy as an underground sewage tunnel, and the ruined buildings they are in are filled with graffiti and broken bricks and windows. But one thing that has not changed is the performance art world continues to thrive with modern technology and devices, and cocktails are still served in glasses during the performances.

Saul is fragile and has difficulty eating on a specially designed breakfast chair. He sleeps in an Orchard Bed, which has many tubes connecting to his internal organs. His partner Caprice monitors a new organ's growth inside of Saul and inks a tattoo on it inside his body. One of their shows is for Caprice to cut Saul open to harvest the tattooed organ by using a video game control, in front of a group of excited prestigious guests in evening dresses with cameras in hand.

Apparently, the government holds a tight control over the evolution of human bodies. Saul and Caprice must register the new organ with the National Organ Registry which has only two officials, Wippet (Don McKellar) and his assistant Timlin (Kristen Stewart), in a rundown office with piles of paper files that look like they are from the 1950s. The jittery Timlin seems to share a common fetish with the two performance artists—they get excited about cutting flesh open. Surgery is the new sex, as they claim.

It's evident that performance art has outlived humanity.

David Cronenberg, the creator of this eerie world, perhaps is trying to make a point about where the world we are living in is going. It definitely doesn't look good. But in making that point, he challenges every sense of ours, and profoundly shakes the buffer of our comfort zone. In a bizarre world he creates, a sadistic act becomes a tranquil and desirable body modification process. This is certainly not a movie for the faint-hearted.

The jab at modern art provides many moments of comic relief in the film, and gives us a little breathing room between the visuals that might leave us with nightmares. It's quite a contrast between the stylish dresses the guests are wearing and the grimy sites in which they are gathering.

The movie takes you on a trip from which you can't wait to get back home. It will be a daring experience to sit through the film.

"Crimes of the Future" opens on Friday, June 3, 2022.