"Crimes of the Future"

I got real excited about seeing this movie at the Tower Theater, because it has Kristen Stewart in it. Stewart chooses the most interesting movies these days. Director David Cronenberg has a reputation for body horror, but hadn't directed a movie in a while. So, a lot of potential here for a great sci-fi movie. 

What a weird film! A world where pain and infection and even blood-letting are unknown. A world that develops a lust for amateur surgery, performance surgery, surgery on street corners, etc. Like tattoo culture, but much more extreme. 

The movie doesn't seem to be all that popular (68% on the Tomato Meter), but it is thought-provoking:

“Crimes of the Future” is a thinly conceived dystopian fantasy that offers its characters little psychology and little context, little view of the social order around them or the history that led them there; it displays ideas in isolation from their whys and wherefores. In this regard, it’s a classic “late film”—it’s the first feature that Cronenberg, who’s seventy-nine, has made since 2014, and what he has to say here he lays on the line with few of the blandishments of popular movies, and little of the aesthetic care of art-house ones. It’s a movie to have seen rather than to see. The ideas that Cronenberg puts forth are powerful and poignant; his subject is the effort to make art amid a despoiled cultural environment and debased cultural consumption. It’s a drama of eight years of silence, of a vision of the end of the line, the end of the world as he knew it. 

In the movie’s first dramatic scene, the boy’s mother, Djuna (Lihi Kornowski), finds the boy, Brecken (Sozos Sotiris), sitting on the floor of their bathroom, munching on a plastic garbage basket—which is telling, as “Crimes of the Future” is very much about the crimes of consumption and the system of production that led to them. The movie’s protagonists are a couple of artists, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux), who live and work together. Saul, who has a sort of “accelerated evolution syndrome,” manages to generate inside himself—supposedly even wills into being—new internal organs of unspecified function or no function at all. In private, Caprice examines them invasively, by inserting an endoscopic-lens tube through his skin into his abdomen. Then, in public, their performances involve Saul lying passively on an “autopsy bed,” which Caprice manipulates, via remote control, to open him up and extract these new organs, to the hushed and breathless delight of their audience. (Though directing a film of body horror, Cronenberg tones down the gross-out, in quality and quantity, as if rendering it a mere symbol of itself.)