David Cronenberg is back, baby. That’s what they said. “The king of body horror returns.” “A spiritual successor to Videodrome and Crash.” “Get ready to squirm.” What we got instead was Crimes of the Future—a film so slow, so murky, so full of people explaining what just happened instead of actually doing anything, it feels less like a horror movie and more like being trapped in a grad school lecture on post-organ politics… held inside a broken sensory deprivation tank… hosted by performance artists who smell like formaldehyde.
The year is sometime in the future—an indeterminate, sad-beige tomorrow where pain has disappeared, surgery is considered art, and humans are growing extra organs for no good reason. Plastic is edible now. Everyone’s dirty. Technology is organic. And everything, everything, looks like it’s been sneezed on by H.R. Giger and forgotten in a moldy garage.
Our main character is Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), a man who looks like a cross between Nosferatu and a sleep-deprived yoga instructor. He’s constantly hunched over, wears hooded cloaks like he’s cosplaying a broken monk, and coughs like he’s trying to audition for a tuberculosis PSA. Saul is one of the few remaining humans who can still feel pain—sort of—and his body keeps growing new organs spontaneously, like internal spam emails. So naturally, he and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) turn this into performance art, cutting him open on stage while a stoned audience watches and nods solemnly.
Yes. This is a movie about interpretive surgery. I wish I were kidding.
They lie inside a grotesque, bug-shaped autopsy bed with creepy tendrils and squishy parts, slicing him open while moaning about the meaning of art. There are scalpels, viscera, and lots of blank stares. And the audience just laps it up. It’s the only film I’ve seen where live organ removal gets polite applause and not an immediate call to 911.
The “plot” (and I’m using that term generously) kicks in when a new breed of humans begins to evolve—they can digest plastic and are growing new organs as a kind of evolutionary rebellion. There’s a subplot about a dead child who ate synthetic candy bars and was autopsied for political reasons. There’s a plastic-eating cult. There are two creepy technicians who murder people while flirting. Kristen Stewart plays a twitchy bureaucrat with the energy of a malfunctioning Roomba who got into her mom’s Xanax. She wants to have sex with Saul, maybe. She whispers every line like she’s afraid the walls will hear her.
But let’s be honest—none of this matters. Crimes of the Future isn’t interested in narrative. It’s interested in vibes. Gunky, surgical, uncomfortable vibes. The kind of vibe you get when someone hands you a wet latex glove and says, “Smell this—it’s conceptual.” Cronenberg doesn’t so much tell a story as he hovers over one, like a sadistic professor dropping cryptic notes on a test you’re already failing.
The dialogue is a mishmash of pseudo-intellectual babble and tired cyberpunk jargon. Everyone talks like they’ve been trapped in an avant-garde philosophy seminar for years. “Surgery is the new sex,” one character intones with the enthusiasm of a tax accountant explaining depreciation. “We are creating new organs without ideology,” another drones. It’s like a game of Mad Libs co-written by Nietzsche and the surgeon from The Human Centipede.
The production design deserves a medal for making everything look both futuristic and deeply unsanitary. The chairs writhe. The beds pulsate. The machines seem to sigh. Every environment is stained, oily, or looks like it was rented from a haunted digestive tract. Watching this movie is like wandering through the worst part of a medical fetish convention hosted in an abandoned aquarium.
And then there’s Viggo. Dear, committed Viggo. He grunts, winces, and shuffles his way through the film like he’s on the last day of a juice cleanse gone horribly wrong. He spends most of the movie either sleeping in creepy furniture, vomiting quietly, or whispering cryptic things while eating pudding with a spoon like he’s been grounded. You want to care about Saul, but he’s so mired in metaphor and mucus that by the time he coughs up yet another existential line about performance art and flesh, you’re rooting for the chairs to eat him just to move things along.
The pacing is glacial. Characters enter rooms, whisper about bureaucratic procedures, and then leave. People stand in dim hallways looking meaningfully at walls. Occasionally, someone cuts into someone else with a weird scalpel or makes out next to a wound. This is supposed to be shocking, or provocative, or something. But it all feels tired. Sterile. Like Cronenberg dusted off his old notebooks from 1996 and said, “Eh, good enough.”
And the body horror? Sure, it’s there. But it’s not horrifying. It’s… clinical. There’s no punch. No shock. No electricity. Just organs laid bare, not for terror, but for tepid reflection. It’s like someone made Hellraiser with a Xanax filter and the lighting budget of a broken tanning salon.
Final Thoughts:
Crimes of the Future is a movie where nothing really happens, everyone speaks in riddles, and people get horny about spleens. It’s Cronenberg going back to his roots, but finding only dust, rust, and a bunch of characters who confuse confusion for profundity. It wants to be a philosophical exploration of human evolution, art, and sensuality—but ends up as a damp, sluggish meditation on how not to pace a movie.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 new organs.
If this is the future of cinema, you can keep it. I’ll be in the past, rewatching The Fly and wondering when Cronenberg’s scalpel stopped being sharp and started feeling like a plastic spoon in a bowl of cold soup.
