If Stereo was David Cronenberg’s artsy, stoned freshman thesis, then Crimes of the Future is his drug-induced sophomore manifesto—longer, dumber, and twice as convinced it’s saying something important. It’s 63 minutes of visual static, pseudo-scientific gibberish, and actors who move like they were directed by a mannequin on lithium.
And no, this isn’t the 2022 Crimes of the Future with Viggo Mortensen chewing on plastic buckets and whispering about pain as performance art. This is the original Crimes of the Future—the 1970 student-film-turned-patience-test where Cronenberg decided the future would be bleak, speechless, and smell vaguely of antiseptic and damp wool.
There is, again, no spoken dialogue. That’s right—Cronenberg doubled down on the thing that made Stereo a chore to watch. The soundtrack is a blend of eerie drones, random electronic buzzing, and the sound of existential dread breathing heavily into a microphone. The characters—if you can call these beige-clad, dead-eyed men “characters”—don’t speak. They loiter. They wander. They shuffle around empty buildings like bored ghosts waiting for a bus that never comes.
The “plot,” if you can squint and find one, involves a man named Adrian Tripod (stop laughing) who runs an institute after a mysterious plague has wiped out all sexually mature women. Yes, all of them. Women are extinct. Which you’d think would spark some level of urgency or horror, but in Cronenberg’s hands, it feels about as emotionally fraught as losing your last piece of gum. Adrian’s job seems to involve walking through corridors, touching himself, and engaging in vaguely medical rituals that might be science or might be performance art. It’s hard to say. There’s lotion involved. Often.
Adrian visits strange institutions—the House of Skin, the Institute of Neo-Venereal Disease, and a spa that looks like a Soviet dentist’s office. These places all look the same: abandoned university buildings with bad lighting and haunted fluorescent fixtures. The future, according to 1970 Cronenberg, involves a lot of filing cabinets, elbow-length gloves, and zero women. It’s like Mad Max, if Max had tenure and the apocalypse was driven by sexual frustration and a lack of indoor voices.
Thematically, the film is clearly obsessed with disease, control, mutation, and sex—except there’s no actual sex. Just longing. And lotion. And weird dermatological rituals that seem like they were invented during a fever dream while watching a dermatology infomercial. Cronenberg is trying to say something profound about the collapse of human intimacy and the rise of cold, clinical control over the body. But instead of building tension or dread, the film simply drifts from one nonsensical scene to another like a junkie looking for meaning in an anatomy chart.
And just like Stereo, Crimes of the Future is allergic to emotion. The performances are as flat as roadkill on a prairie highway. Everyone speaks in slow-motion body language. You can tell Cronenberg was still in his “cerebral” phase—meaning he thought feelings were a distraction and plot was a capitalist construct. So instead, we get Adrian sniffing lotion, rubbing his temples, and walking in and out of rooms like he’s looking for his lost car keys and a reason to exist.
Cronenberg does try to spice things up with some bizarre visuals. There’s a mutant child kept in a crib made of gauze. There’s a room full of men watching a man smear paste on his chest like it’s a religious rite. There are rubber gloves. So many rubber gloves. At one point, someone pulls hair out of someone else’s face, and it’s treated like the dramatic climax. You start wondering if the movie is building to something. Spoiler: it isn’t. It just ends. Like it got bored of itself and wandered off.
The whole thing plays like a weird art installation that nobody knows how to turn off. If you told me the script was written in one sitting using the notes section of a medical journal and a Ouija board, I’d believe you. Cronenberg is clearly interested in the relationship between the body, technology, and control—but in Crimes of the Future, that interest is smothered in abstraction and drowned in self-importance.
And the pacing? Forget it. Time bends in this movie. A 60-minute runtime feels like a slow death. You don’t watch Crimes of the Future—you endure it. It’s like sitting through a lecture on post-human evolution delivered by someone who hasn’t spoken to another human being since Trudeau Sr. was in office.
There are moments—tiny, fleeting moments—when Cronenberg’s future brilliance peeks through. You can see the early bones of Videodrome, Dead Ringers, and The Fly. The obsession with transformation. The violation of flesh. The eroticization of control. But those moments are buried beneath layers of impenetrable nonsense and humorless surrealism. It’s like digging through drywall to find a light switch.
In short, Crimes of the Future is the kind of film that makes you question not just the future of cinema, but your own. Do I still have time to make better choices? Could I have done literally anything else with this hour of my life? The answer is always yes.
Final Thoughts: Watching Crimes of the Future is like licking a battery in the name of art. It’s sterile, joyless, and aggressively obtuse. If you want to impress someone at a film school mixer, you can say you’ve seen it. Just be prepared to describe it as “formally bold” while quietly dying inside.
Rating: 1 out of 5 bottles of futuristic body lotion.
Recommended only if you’ve lost a bet, need to punish your film class, or you’re writing a dissertation on Canadian masochism.
