DIRECTOR NOT TOO FAR AFIELD

HUMAN LIKENESS FOUND IN FUTURE MEDICAL SCIENCE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The master of body horror paints civilization in an entirely different light.

But director David Cronenberg drifts only into the near possibilities in Crimes of the Future (2022).

The director envisions that the synthetic wrap infiltrating the natural environment will accelerated human evolution to the extent that pain becomes neutralized and body organs overcompensate by regenerating.

If you grow a new organ though, you have to get the inner creation registered. 

Cronenberg casts Viggo Mortensen as performance artist Saul Tenser and Lea Seydoux as producer Caprice exploiting the inner metamorphosis of organs as avant-garde performance art.

Specialized biomechanical devices allow for so called desktop surgeries that Saul and Caprice utilize in their performances taking place in public operational theaters.

The medical industry represents a shipwreck though carrying the rich and famous who spend pocket change to stay young or spend a bit more to become someone else than who the genetic code made them into.

And forum shopping for organs that give back life has fallen sideways.

Cronenberg uses dark brooding shadows around rundown interior architecture but then he lights up the actors in a glow as if each scene is a bit or a piece of creation on the ceiling of the 16^th Chapel in Vatican City.

“The world is killing our children” states the father of a deceased child as justification for his willingness to facilitate a public autopsy of his son whose organs imploded after eating plastic.

Mortensen performs Saul as not so interested in bringing meaning to his world as performing and allowing Caprice to attain her professional goals by running the show.

Saul’s sadomasochism becomes accented with narcissism when the head of the yet to be official National Organ Registry organizes an off grid independent group running an ‘inner body beauty pageant.’

Even official new age creationism has found corruption.

Kristen Stewart plays Timlin working out of the office of the National Registry but who becomes enamored and then absolutely infatuated with Saul as an artist, as if Mortensen was playing Pablo Picasso chopping up his inner secrets into bits and pieces for public display.

God gave the body to the people but the people commodify, even brand, tattoo and mutilate what has been given them as signs of the toxic dysfunctional civilization in which they live.

A brooding sweeping score adds additional tone and atmosphere to the shadows hiding rundown buildings.

Cronenberg suggests that pain and suffering has a purpose in keeping humanity within a certain moral compass. Without pain, humanity strays off course and quite often falls altogether sideways while seeking escape from the fall through instant gratification and pleasure.

This 1 hour and 47 minute runtime goes by quick but Cronenberg gets the message across with body gore and a clique of performance artists creating a unique following.

Body shaming and plastic surgery has gone so far out as to devolve and make outer beauty undesirable to the point that beautiful people try to regain their humanity with a bit of nihilism and self-laceration.

As a dire warning to humanity, the director has Saul wonder about the sets dressed in black, as if he has become the angel of death personified.

Director David Cronenberg has been featured in ICONIC MOVIES, while Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux and Kristen Stewart have each had a turn at CINERAMA.