Crimes of the Future
NEONThis is not the first time David Cronenberg has attempted to project his thoughts on plastic surgeries and cosmetic treatments. The ethics that surround him are found in many of his features, notably so in his recent short film, Crimes of the Future. Seemingly uncontented with a brief musing on a large topic, Cronenberg gears himself up for a return to the big screen. His previous features strayed further and further away from body horror and closer to heavily critical features that mock and chastise fundamental states of living and the star power that guides it. A shock return to body horror is just about the only shock Cronenberg offers here in a film that feels gut-wrenchingly familiar and sadly conventional.
Has Cronenberg become a pastiche of himself? Hardly. There are still fine moments for the director to revel in throughout Crimes of the Future, they just feel distant and similar to the lower echelons of his genre workings. Not as bad as Crash, not as good as eXistenz, just around the level of The Dead Zone or some of his earlier works. Cronenberg does call back to those early days as an up-and-coming director shocking audiences with rabid apartment blocks full of infected zombies. They do not feel like earned reconciliations, more a panicked attempt to rekindle what spurred his creativity in the first place. Cronenberg tries desperately, admirably, to come full circle after so long away from making movies, but all he does is make a vehicle for Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart to swerve around in.
Swerve they do. Along with Leá Seydoux, the trio are well-matched and poorly executed on the big screen. Mentioning a theme is not the same as exploring it. Unfortunately, Cronenberg does not realise this as he would so frequently in his heyday. Varying levels of disgust crop up throughout but without the heart that is used to guide them. Strange? Yes. Meaningful? Not particularly. A range of weird, from children chowing down on toilet bins to alien-like rest chambers that suction onto the hands of Mortensen, are included, but not explained. The lack of explanation used to be a beautiful channel of thought for Cronenberg, most notably in Naked Lunch, but here that explanation is absent entirely. No hint of what theme a scene hopes to grasp at, no clasp of beauty or intricacy ever explored beyond Cronenberg’s usual horrors, paraded in a modern light that works well in the scenes it is given. A dancing man clad with ears captures the troublesome era of social media cataclysm, but Cronenberg fails to connect it elsewhere.
Audiences of Cannes walk out for a number of reasons. Who’d have thought one of those reasons would be boredom? Crimes of the Future, as painful as it is to say, is boring. Cronenberg tries to clamour back that body horror which made him such a cult figure and, eventually, a fabled legend of the horror genre. Old hands and a collection of performers the Canadian-born director has clicked with before are not enough to elevate a consistently flatlining feature commentating on the highs and lows, ethically speaking, of surgeries and how disfigurement brings about a new view not just for how people look at one another, but for how they look at themselves. Cronenberg gets lost in the message, never deciding if he’d like to go the way of Crash or A Dangerous Mind. Either way, he follows the false avenue. As disturbed as a usual Cronenberg feature, but fragmented and poorly glued together.