Most filmmakers who want to pester you into a horror movie will have access to a familiar set of tools: slashes, demons, shock pieces, and a soundtrack that goes. bubble! In the Night. But in Future Crimes, writer and director David Cronenberg seeks to provoke and annoy us with something more shocking than just monsters.
Am I talking about the fact that in the far future where the movie is set, humans are growing mysterious new organs in their bodies? Or that surgically removing those organs became for a creepy rebel named Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) a form of performance art? Or are people no longer in physical pain, and thus will be standing in the street late at night chopping into each other for cheap thrills, as if they were shooting heroin down a back alley? Or has the surgery itself, in the words of one, become the “new sex”?
If you see Future Crimes, you will witness all of these assaults, and a few more besides that. However, the film’s most disadvantaged aspect is none of those hypersensitive events. It’s a fact that “future crimes” make you feel like you’ve been under attack before metaphors. It’s a physical horror movie that keeps cultivating new “ideas”. Like most Cronenberg films, it works from the head down.
Cronenberg has always been addicted to metaphor. His first theatrically staged film, They Came From Within (1975), is set in an apartment complex in Toronto where slippery parasites turn residents into raging sexual monsters—sexual zombies. In The Brood (1979), his first film to win critical acclaim that will attach itself to Cronenberg for the next forty years, a woman in the midst of a custody battle gives birth to a dwarf child who is presented as the embodiment of her “wrath”. By the time he got to Videodrome (1983), his first major studio production, Cronenberg had begun to plunge into metaphor, making a cracking hallucinogenic thriller about sex, violence, and technology climax as someone’s stomach turned into a VCR. . The last words of the hero are “Long live the new body”.
Cronenberg has always focused on the old body versus the new body. What is the new body? The body is what changes, transforms, and comes from within. It’s cancer. It is an outbreak of forbidden passion. It also represents something that is “evolving” about us. Cronenberg patented some kind of physical horror, which means that for him the body is not just the body. It embodies the people – and the monsters – who we are inside. It’s bad dreams that made the body.
Some “future crimes” are bloody and disturbing, if not completely over “Warning! It might be too much for the faint of heart!” The level the movie deserves, William Castle Advance advertising and it has been suggested. However, the film, like many of Cronenberg’s films, is a heart-wrenching experience that is truly, at the bottom, a painstakingly stressful, brain-dead experience. It’s a strange nightmare that keeps telling you what to think about what that means.
Cronenberg became an incredibly eclectic filmmaker (his work includes adaptations of “M Butterfly” and “Naked Lunch,” the graphic novel “History of Violence,” the psychotic labyrinth film “Spider” and the Freudian costume and gong drama “A Dangerous Method”), but “Crimes of the Future” marks a return to the formative hype of his early films. It also has links to the conceptual “transgression” of “breakdown”. This film remains the most famous of Cronenberg’s career, but not because it is a taboo. It’s more than anyone of common sense would watch and think, “Really? A car crash like an aphrodisiac? Is that a joke?”
“The Meltdown” Cronenberg was madly pushing his metaphor against the wall, doing the same in “Future Crimes.” But this is a more compelling movie, because in its bleak futuristic way it invites you into the world of dystopia that it creates. The film enthralls and excites you, bolstered by a great Howard Shore score, which sometimes references the slow motion of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as rewritten by Boris Karloff.
The movie begins with a boy taking bites from a plastic trash can, then his mother choking him with a pillow – presumably because she can’t stand a kid eating in the trash. (As it turns out, that’s exactly why). Then we cut to Saul Tenser, a performer from surgical hell, awake in a bag of organic seeds that appeared to have been purchased from a furniture store called Crate and Alien. It is, in fact, an OrchidBed, designed to anticipate and comply with all of the body’s needs. Saul sleeps in one baby because that’s how smart, witty, and sensitive he is. (He also has a more unusual dining chair, which makes him look like a stroke victim.) Mortensen lends character to a wounded mystery of swinging the supremacy of rock stars. Walking around in his masked shawl, he’s like death from “The Seventh Seal” across with Kirk Douglas, though he speaks in a pebble purring voice that might put you in mind many Batmans.
“Crimes of the Future” was filmed in Greece, and the settings have a crumbly, Venice-like European flavor at 3:00 in the morning, yet this world is very far from ours. Thanks to the “rapid development syndrome”, the human race is mutating (that’s why the pain disappears), and “office surgery” has become a thing. Saul performs his performing art in collaboration with his live partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux); They plan each show as a kind of theatrical medical catharsis. As the audience stands there in awe, staring as the music beats, Saul lies on the operating table, while Caprice, using a controlled ice plate, uses pliers that resemble skeletal arms to slice him open and pull his stomach away, reaching inward to obtain the organ The new one he got. Is this a sick sight? It sure is. But only in the Cronenberg movie will it be presented as a form of entertainment.
There is a plot. It’s about the National Member Register, an organization that looks like William S. Burroughs tracks the growth of new organs – run by Whippet (Don McKellar), a goofy bureaucrat, and Timlin (Kristen Stewart), a lively and shy assistant, who becomes so busy watching Saul’s last surgical performance that he flips him over for him, as if it were Jim Morrison to remove a general tumor. . Stewart appears, in moments, to parody “SNL” Kristen Stewart at its most tense, but does it on purpose; Sights have a charge.
There is another organization, this organization has nothing to do with the evil government. It is a sect of people who have undergone their own evolution, resulting in them spawning and eating what appear to be purple candy bars. Yes, another metaphor! But do not be afraid, it will all be explained. There is also a scene in a nightclub with a dancer with his eyes, lips and ears closed all over his body. In Crimes of the Future, you get the feeling that Cronenberg wants to be William Castle, and William S. Burroughs, and HR Geiger at the same time.
This 8-year-old boy who is killed in the opening scene returns to the movie. His father, Lange (Scott Speedman), wants to deliver the body to Saul and Caprice so they can perform an autopsy during one of their shows. Once you get to the wavelength of the film, even a twist like this doesn’t throw you off. It’s like, “Anatomy of a nightclub for the kid who ate a trash? Why not?” I’m not going to give away what’s going on, except to say that the child’s father is one of those purple candy eaters, and that has something to do with the way the secret sect—and perhaps the human race—evolves. It might be the theme of “Future Crimes,” which he concludes with his last scene: You are what you eat. What’s so provocative about Cronenberg’s grand metaphor, but also a bit cliched, is that it’s about technology and how it’s changed us, but the director’s point of view, as it has been for decades, is that of someone who looks suspiciously at technology because he finds it strange. However, what if it isn’t? Future Crimes will prove to be too extreme for most viewers, but one of the reasons for the film he is So extreme that he is overwhelmed by the fears most of them have long looked at in the past.
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