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Crimes of the Future Movie Review

Crimes of the Future is a 2022 science fiction body horror film directed by David Cronenberg and starring Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux and Kristen Stewart. It’s an effective genre allegory.

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“Surgery is the new sex“

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Humans adapt to a synthetic environment with new transformations and mutations. With his partner Caprice, Saul Tenser, celebrity performance artist, publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. This is a great return to form for Cronenberg, a director who hasn’t had a really strong movie in quite a while.

Here, he goes back to his usual body horror tropes, but this time around he elevates the gross material with very apt metaphors included. It is hilarious to me how most critics entirely missed that this story is a very clear allegory for transgender surgeries. Those that correctly connected the dots still failed to properly analyze it, so here we go.

Yes, this is the world where surgeries act as rebellion against the system. You can certainly deduce that the movie positively portrays the trans experience. However, I would counter that the story also acts as predictor and a warning to where we are headed. So many women are constantly getting surgeries and so many trans people are receiving life-changing, but dangerous and mutilating surgeries that the movie so clearly showcases through extremely grotesque body horror imagery.

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In this way, Crimes of the Future becomes a fascinating and very creepy SF story that is essential in pinpointing the human obsession with physical appearances and it acts as a cautionary tale on how dangerous body-altering surgeries can be. Again, this is a complicated issue, but most people failing to bring up this other side of the movie that is so clearly there is frustratingly problematic and it only comes across as shamelessly insincere.

Viggo Mortensen is excellent in the main role and I found his commitment to this extreme character commendable, though his whispering voice really annoyed me as this is a very cringey trope in movies and shows that needs to die off already. Lea Seydoux is reliably excellent in a role that demanded a lot of sexuality and nudity from her and she always excels at playing these very openly sensual women. Kristen Stewart is terrific as well, though she got very little screen time in comparison to the above two.

Crimes of the Future played at Cannes and it received a standing ovation there, but it ended up getting very poor audience response and that is entirely understandable. Though Cronenberg should be applauded for trying to bridge the gap between the two vastly different audiences, I am afraid that he did not succeed in that as the film is overly slow, way too artsy and also at times relying on its gross imagery way too much to make a point.

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It’s a film that is so repulsive to watch, but its importance makes it worthwhile. It’s a shame that it was utterly lacking in the suspense department as whenever the movie relied on more action thriller elements, it wasn’t as effective. The VFX are tremendous and the body mutilation sequences looked eerily real, but they were also too horrible to look at and the movie became too repetitious in bringing up the similar imagery over and over again.