‘Crimes of the Future’ KVIFF 2022 review: body horror parable from David Cronenberg

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Surgery is the new sex in Crimes of the Future, filmmaker David Cronenberg’s retro-futuristic new feature that comes to the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival after debuting at Cannes last month. Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart give equally compelling performances in this talky but hypnotic new feature that rates as one of the eclectic director’s best films in years, and builds on themes previously explored in 1996’s Crash.

Set amid a stark future wasteland that resembles a decaying European resort (much of the movie was filmed in seaside locations in Greece), Crimes of the Future imagines a society where human evolution has spun off into disturbing new directions. In this world, pain has largely disappeared, and some individuals are developing new organs without known functions—a phenomenon called Accelerated Evolution Syndrome.

Against this backdrop, surgery has morphed into a form of underground performance art, with audiences gathering to witness live dissections as a form of entertainment. Mortensen gives an arresting performance as Saul Tenser, a celebrated artist who grows new organs inside his body and, with the help of his partner Caprice (Seydoux), has them extracted live on stage.

Mortensen’s hushed, gravelly voice and frail physicality lend Saul an enigmatic charisma, a figure as much a symbol of suffering as he is a visionary creator. Stewart shines in a slyly comic turn as Timlin, a nervous bureaucrat in the National Organ Registry who becomes infatuated with Saul’s work, embodying the film’s strange blend of eroticism and clinical detachment.

The film’s slow, deliberate pacing may frustrate some viewers, as lengthy, talk-heavy scenes and philosophical musings dominate the narrative. Yet even with this restrained momentum, Cronenberg’s vision never loses its grip—each scene unfolding like a carefully composed surgical tableau, drawing the audience deeper into this strange, unsettling world. The film’s sense of quiet unease builds cumulatively, making even the most grotesque sequences feel both inevitable and hauntingly beautiful.

Visually, Crimes of the Future is a feast of unsettling textures. Douglas Koch’s muted, claustrophobic cinematography drenches the decaying sets in shadow, while Howard Shore’s moody score pulses with an eerie, minimalist unease.

The production design evokes a twisted medical-industrial aesthetic: beds that pulsate like organic growths, chairs that cradle and twist bodies into submission, and surgical tools that resemble alien skeletal appendages. The practical effects—organs glistening with viscera, skin peeled back like parchment—are both grotesque and mesmerizing, grounding Cronenberg’s metaphors in the visceral reality of flesh.

With grossout body horror effects in the vein of Videodrome or The Fly, claustrophobic visuals that recall Naked Lunch, and thematic material similar to Crash, Crimes of the Future is pure Cronenberg all the way, and the director’s best film since 2011’s A Dangerous Method or even 2007’s Eastern Promises. Only a stagy presentation and detached narrative keep it from ranking among the top tier of Cronenberg’s classics.

Crimes of the Future may not be for the faint of heart, but it’s a bold, uncompromising work from a director who has never shied away from pushing boundaries. With its grotesque beauty and heady themes, Cronenberg’s latest reminds us that in his world, the body is never just the body—it’s an endlessly fascinating site of transformation, desire, and ultimately, decay.

Crimes of the Future

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Jason Pirodsky

Jason Pirodsky has been writing about the Prague film scene and reviewing films in print and online media since 2005. A member of the Online Film Critics Society, you can also catch his musings on life in Prague at expats.cz and tips on mindfulness sourced from ancient principles at MaArtial.com.

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