{"id":34619,"date":"2022-06-03T05:26:03","date_gmt":"2022-06-03T05:26:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/crimes-of-the-future-review-the-horror-the-horror\/"},"modified":"2022-06-03T05:26:03","modified_gmt":"2022-06-03T05:26:03","slug":"crimes-of-the-future-review-the-horror-the-horror","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/crimes-of-the-future-review-the-horror-the-horror\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Crimes of the Future’ Review: The Horror, the Horror"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Few filmmakers slither under the skin and directly into the head as mercilessly as David Cronenberg. For decades, he has been unsettling audiences, derailing genre expectations and expanding the limits of big-screen entertainment with exploding heads, gasping wounds and desiring, suffering, metamorphosing bodies. A modern-day augur, he opens up characters – psychically and physically – with a detached cool and scalpel-like cinematic technique, exploring what lies (and festers) inside as he divines prophetic meaning.<\/p>\n

His latest, \u201cCrimes of the Future,\u201d is very tough and creepy, yet improbably relaxed; it’s a low-key dispatch from the end of the world. Set in an indeterminate future, it centers on a pair of artists – Viggo Mortensen as Saul, L\u00e9a Seydoux as Caprice – who mount surgeries as performances. With Saul lying supine in a biomorphic apparatus as viewers gaze from the sidelines, Caprice – using a multicolored controller – delicately probes Saul’s viscera di lui, removing mysterious new organs that have grown inside his body di lui. The audience members are quiet, attentive, respectful (moviegoers might yelp); for his part of him, Saul looks ecstatic.<\/p>\n

The movie takes place in a depopulated waterfront city where the carcasses of rusted, barnacle-covered ships languish on the shore. There, in shadowy streets and derelict buildings, men and women roam, often without apparent purpose, as if heavily medicated or perhaps blasted by that collective devastation called reality. There’s a disconcerting, characteristically Cronenbergian lack of affect to most of them – few experience pain anymore – even when they’re carving one another up in dark corners or in performances. Times have changed, but the human appetite for violence and spectacle remain intact.<\/p>\n

The story emerges incrementally in scenes that seem to drift even as they lock into place. In between performances and shoptalk, Saul and Caprice are drawn into overlapping intrigues involving a dead child and an inner-beauty pageant. An amusing Kristen Stewart shows up with Don McKellar in a decrepit office that once could have been used by Philip Marlowe, but now has the disquieting words \u201cNational Organ Registry\u201d inscribed on the front door. There’s also a cop (Welket Bungu\u00e9) who skulks around with Saul in the shadows, where the dead child’s father (Scott Speedman) lurks enigmatically.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n