A chillingly beautiful dare of a movie, David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” imagines a near-future much like the present, only colder and more feral.
Shot in Athens, largely at night, writer-director Cronenberg’s first feature since “Maps to the Stars” eight years ago gathers up a lifetime of personal obsessions in a story Cronenberg conceived late last century, and only now has gotten around to filming, the way no else could. Or would.
The title comes from an early experimental picture Cronenberg made in 1970, set in a skin clinic where horrible things have happened to patients who used a certain kind of cosmetic, unaware of its dangers. The threats in the new “Crimes of the Future,” which shares a general theme and a title with the previous one, are everything everywhere all at once.
Strange new worlds are being born inside the human body. The body politic in this arid near-future has become a literal body politic in revolt. More and more citizens here, in a time and place in which pain has been nearly entirely eradicated, are coming down with something called Accelerated Evolution Syndrome. This causes bodily organs to self-generate with unpredictable results.
And there’s money in those organs. Performance art “happenings” have emerged in underground salon settings, with the afflicted slicing themselves open to reveal their brand-new innards to the assembled audience. One of these performance artists is played by frequent Cronenberg collaborator Viggo Mortensen (”Eastern Promises,” “A History of Violence”). His character, Saul Tenser, works with his partner and sort-of lover Caprice (Léa Seydoux), a former trauma surgeon. Their world is one of singular trappings, including a podlike chair that senses pain, causing the arms of the chair to manipulate and soothe the body at hand, like an arthritic masseuse.
Tenser and Caprice catch the attention of the shadowy National Organ Registry, which catalogs new organs. (Cronenberg keeps the motives vague.) The registry’s apparently two-person staff is made up of Wippet (Don McKellar) and his associate, the twitchy, furtive Timlin. She is played by Kristen Stewart, sneakily hilarious as a true devotee of what Tenser is up to, namely: the most extreme and exotic form of “cutting” imaginable.
If that sounds tasteless, “Crimes of the Future” will surely be that to many, if only for its blech factor, roughly medium level by Cronenberg standards. He has done everything from “Scanners” to “The Fly” to “Crash,” refining his immaculate technique in different directions over the decades.
What makes “Crimes of the Future” work has everything to do with texture. The interiors and exteriors of Athens, especially at night, have been captured truly and well by Cronenberg’s design team. The blood-red and lava-orange opening credits set the mood of sinister allure. What Cronenberg has to say metaphorically about art and artists and, among other themes, environmental collapse, egged on by humans, does not add up to any conventional sense or shape.
That is not a flaw, merely a fact. The prologue, which leaves one particularly vulnerable character dead and a corpse up for grabs, establishes the stakes. Rhythmically “Crimes of the Future” maintains a rigorous sense of calm throughout, which can get a little pokey in some scenes. But Mortensen, Seydoux and especially Stewart invest fully, so some of us, anyway, can too.
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'CRIMES OF THE FUTURE'
3 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: R (for strong disturbing violent content and grisly images, graphic nudity, and some language)
Running time: 1:47
How to watch: In theaters Friday
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