Crimes of the Future

Crimes of the Future has been touted as David Cronenberg's return to body horror, with comparisons to earlier work like Videodrome, Scanners, and eXistenZ dominating the conversation. It's easy to see why: his newest film penetrates the flesh of humanity in a near future in which our organs no longer play by the rules, as if evolution is wreaking vengeance for our attempted tyranny over the natural world. The main axiom of Videodrome, "long live the new flesh," might actually be better applied to Crimes of the Future, in which the new flesh that has started spreading within us is perfectly suited to an industrial wasteland of the 21st century. Just as compelling as these connections to Cronenberg's past work, though, are the more implicit echoes that are less consumed with bodily trauma: for example, the grimy minimalism of Shivers (1975), the clinical non-sexuality of Dead Ringers (1988), the literariness of Naked Lunch (1991). Whether intentional or not, Crimes of the Future plays like a self-referential endpoint for Cronenberg's favorite thematic and formal motifs, uniquely updated for the 2020s and its discussions of climate change and bodily autonomy. How strange it is, then, that it also ends up being one of Cronenberg's most guardedly hopeful films. 

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