Crimes of the Future

The film, starring Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux, and Kirsten Stewart, works on multiple levels, the filmmaker explains to Vulture.

But it’s been said, “Are you giving a kind of wink to the audience?” And I’m saying, “Totally not.” I don’t have that in me. I really don’t know the answer to that question. And once again, I can say, “If I don’t make them, it’s not like the world’s going to fall.” Everyone who I have spoken to about you talks about what a sweet and normal person you are. One is that we bend plastics and we suppress plastics and we try to clean the ocean and we clean the atmosphere and we clean everybody’s body of plastic. The thing is, I know people find this hard to believe, but I just simply don’t think about that when I’m making a movie. No, because he always says, “Remember, we gave you a prize …” He says it like he thinks I don’t know that he hated the movie. But it’s not a term I would have ever thought of because it’s just not the way I perceive it. We had that screening in Venice of the 4K version of Crash and it was quite a young audience, and they had no problem. When he left, I said to the people at New Line, “Well, I don’t know that he really wants to do this.” And they said, “No, his agent just said he really wants to do it.” I was surprised because we were talking so abstractly and about art and all kinds of stuff that I wasn’t sure that he’d actually agreed to do the movie or not, and found out that he actually had somehow. The other possible solution is that we learn to live with plastic and that we learn to use it as fuel. It was New Line that was producing History of Violence, and Viggo had been a big star in Lord of the Rings, which was also New Line. I don’t know if they suggested him or I just thought he would be good for the role.

Movie reviews: 'Crimes of the Future' is a subversive, biological thriller with meaning · This image released by Neon shows Lea Seydoux, background, and Viggo ...

This is electronic warfare, a critical but largely invisible aspect of Russia's war against Ukraine. Every night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy rallies Ukrainians to the fight with a video address on social media. Every night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy rallies Ukrainians to the fight with a video address on social media. Still, as wordy and occasionally pedantic as Fessenden’s script is, the ideas buried within are worthy of thought. During the Civil War, four Union soldiers must decide whether to transport a badly injured Black soldier (Motell Gyn Foster) to the hospital for treatment. Divided into three vignettes, all ripe with confusion and camaraderie, each segment is shot in a cinematic style that reflects the era in which it is set. Beautifully performed, they are chamber pieces, enhanced by subtle yet effective shifts in lighting that telegraph the changing mood, and spiritual angst, of the scenes. But late-night dinner table conversations between Frederic and Aaron change the nature of their relationship, leading to a combustible situation and a horrifying request. The result is a subversive movie that, as Caprice says, is “juicy with meaning,” but perhaps too enigmatic for those unfamiliar with the director’s body horror oeuvre. Stewart, as the mousy Timlin, is all eagerness. “Crimes of the Future” asks many questions, but stops just short of providing understandable resolutions. Despite the array of bits and pieces we see on screen, the most important body part in “Crimes of the Future” is the head -- Cronenberg’s head.

David Cronenberg's film is set in a grim future where humans, having lost the ability to feel physical pain, start operating on their own bodies.

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Needless to say, the world-building is a bit complicated! Luckily, the director and some of his cast shed light on the dark secrets of “Crimes” during a preview ...

“When Darwin talked about evolution, he wasn’t talking about it leading gradually to something superior,” Cronenberg said. “Tenser is really an avatar, a template or model of the artist who is actually giving everything he could give, opening himself up and giving what is the deepest, most intimate part of himself hidden inside,” Cronenberg said. “I think we are evolving, not devolving,” Cronenberg said. And to me, that is the model of a true passionate artist.” “I jumped in the pool, and I think that’s what David wants. “You cast brilliant actors who are just right for the role, and it doesn’t matter if they think they don’t know what they’re doing,” Cronenberg said.

Meet the cast of David Cronenberg's brand-new body horror movie Crimes of the Future and the characters they're bringing to horrifying life.

Speedman achieved further mainstream success in the Underworld movie series as Michael, a tortured medical student and werewolf who finds himself in the middle of a centuries-old war between vampires and lycanthropes. Scott Speedman stars as Lang Dotrice, the scruffy leader of an underground survivalist cult who is often found lurking in the shadows eating a mysterious purple candy bar. The movie stars Viggo Mortensen as a performance artist who can grow new organs, which his partner removes in front of a live audience, drawing the attention of government agencies and underground cults in the process. Stewart has since gone on to star in both big-budget films such as Snow White and the Huntsman and Charlie’s Angels, as well as independent movies with respected auteurs such as Oliver Assayas' Clouds of Sils Maria and Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women. Stewart received an Oscar nomination for her performance as Princess Diana in the Pablo Larrain-directed Spencer. Viggo Mortensen stars as Saul Tanser, a performance artist who through “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome” can grow new organs within his body. Cronenberg’s return to cinema after eight years, Crimes of the Future has received strong reviews, especially for its performances.

Indie films jump in between big Hollywood reboots with 'Phantom Of the Open' and Hustle from Netflix also in theaters.

As they wait for a rendezvous hand-over at a roadside café, one falls in love with the waitress and begins to question his life choices. She develops a fast friendship with striking, confident performer Bobbi Kitten (playing herself), discovers her own musical ambitions and in the process creates an identity not wholly her own that lead her down a path of dark obsession. Premiered at Director’s Fortnight in Cannes last year, an official selection at the Toronto and New York film fests. A true story writer by Simon Farnaby from his own book of the same name co-authored by Scott Murray. Together, Saul Tenser (Mortensen), a celebrity performance artist, and his partner Caprice (Seydoux) publicly showcase the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances as Timlin (Stewart), an investigator from the National Organ Registry, obsessively tracks their movements. Benediction on nearly 90 screens is also “a little bigger that the art film patterns of yore. Lonely and at odds, she notices a mysterious stranger (Burn Gorman) watching her from across the street as a serial killer called The Spider stalks the city. For us, or it’s been a plus to be able to pivot and do all kinds of movies,” said Roadside co-president Howard Cohen. Chloe Okuno’s debut feature Watcher was written by Zack Ford and Okuno and stars Maika Monroe as Julia, a young American actress just moved with her half-Romanian husband (Karl Glusman) from the States to Bucharest for his job. The David Cronenberg written and directed dystopian sci-fi body-parts drama Crimes of the Future with Léa Seydoux, Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart debuts fresh off a six-minute standing ovation in Cannes, As the human species adapts to a synthetic environment, bodies undergoes transformations and mutation. As counterprogramming, it’s younger and female — to Top Gun’s older males. It’s pretty wide for IFC, which decided to give it push on as many screens as possible in the three weeks before it goes to digital.

With his first feature in eight years, David Cronenberg returns with a sci-fi horror-thriller starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart.

... We love the hijinks and we love that we know that they’re going to get together, but how are they going to get together?” “Fire Island,” he added, “is such a crucible for those kinds of gay experiences because they happen every day as in a microcosm on the mainland.” But on this island, “Because there are no straight people there, it really is everything. The result is an initially compelling mystery that becomes more predictable as it progresses, until an ending that feels both like a cheap last-minute attempt to steer the film into a more topical direction and hard to care about.” And I love the moments in the movie when you see that anger in Maika, because that’s what I feel a lot of times as well.” But to allow me the space to really get into it about the various class issues within our community was sort of shocking.” He said, “Those kinds of layers are sort of missing from the modern rom-com. So I feel like that’s the journey that you see Julia on in this movie; it’s what Maika did so beautifully, among many things, but I feel like I saw her self-regulating, and I saw the sort of quiet frustration in having to do that constantly. David Harbour on “The Envelope.” This week on “The Envelope” podcast, I spoke to the actor about his role on the series “Stranger Things” along with playing the character of Red Guardian in the movie “Black Widow.” In both the new Season 4 of “Stranger Things” and in “Black Widow,” Harbour was playing characters being held in a Russian prison camp. And her self-doubt is similarly an echo of the internal voice that shames us for overreacting when the danger passes. But to do that, they have to let go of all of the things that they know are real. The story becomes a sharp allegory of the treatment of women. Written and directed by David Cronenberg, one of the undisputed masters of modern horror flmmaking, the speculative sci-fi horror-thriller “ Crimes of the Future” is his first feature film in eight years. And in this case, the blind support for Depp and vitriol directed at Heard reflected a distrust of women that is, sadly, timeless.” It’s been amazing that we’ve helped so many people, but we’re still way, way, way behind the curve on the amount of images that you see of Latinos on the screen — or on television or the theater — given how many of us there are.”

Crimes of the Future features Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen, and Léa Seydoux, but the real MVP is the sentient walnut bed.

It’s a fitting choice for the title of a movie that can feel both like a triumphant return to form and like a half-finished sketchbook. But the performances are mostly mesmerizing, the production design by Carol Spier creates a haunting mood of decay and dread, Douglas Koch’s cinematography offers a Renaissance-painting-worthy depth of texture and shadow, and if your stomach is strong enough to eat without the aid of a sentient bone chair after that one autopsy scene, there will be much to discuss over dinner. At 107 minutes, Crimes of the Future suffers from the rare defect of feeling not quite long enough. Without revealing the mother’s motive or what the child’s father decides to do with his remains, I can say that the investigation of this crime by an agent of the biocrime-investigating “New Vice” division, played by Welket Bungué, yields the movie’s most frustrating and unsatisfying subplot. After this fantastic voyage through the interior of a presumably alien body, it seems perfectly normal that viewers would next find themselves in a never-specified future in which an ailing man like Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) might sleep in a kind of sentient techno-bed, a giant walnut shell suspended from the ceiling on insect legs, while other appendages connect with and seem to nourish or support the man’s fragile limbs. Our modern anxiety over everyday lives that are ever more suffused by technology—a fear that has figured largely in popular art since the start of the industrial age, with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as its cornerstone text—has rarely been expressed with such simplicity and intuitive rightness.

Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux are game, but the director's heart (and his other body parts) just isn't in Crimes of the Future.

Crimes of the Future is the director’s first feature in eight years, since Maps to the Stars, and while he’s hardly been inactive since then, the film has an unmistakably late-career air. But while Crimes of the Future, which shares a title and little else with an early entry in the filmmaker’s career, is filled with imagery that’s downright, well, Cronenbergian, from surreal medical equipment to devices that look organic in nature and extremely Freudian in their design, the filmmaker’s heart (and gonads) just isn’t into it. There’s a National Organ Registry, overseen by Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin, which doesn’t officially exist yet but which nevertheless keeps track of changes in people like Saul. And there’s Berst (Tanaya Beatty) and Router (Nadia Litz), technicians working for the company responsible for the equipment Caprice and Saul use, and Welket Bungué as Cope, a detective lurking around the edges of the story. Surgery is the new sex.” It’s an irresistible claim, one that could double as a tagline, but the truth is that it’s death, not sex, that looms over Crimes of the Future. The film marks David Cronenberg’s long-awaited return to the body-horror genre in which he’s been such a defining force, and from which he’s wandered over the last decade or so. Caprice and Saul have become celebrities in their pared-down world for an act that involves Saul lying inside a modified sarcophagus originally intended for autopsies, and Caprice using its tools to remove the latest growth he’s sprouted as a symptom of the “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome” he suffers from. Does the tendency to sprout new internal organs that are then removed in front of a live audience count as an art of will or a symptom of a rebelling body?

As the Supreme Court threatens to roll back abortion protections, David Cronenberg's body horror film "Crimes of the Future" takes on eerie relevance.

"My satire is a little more gentle, saying, 'Well, maybe the solution to plastic pollution is that we teach our bodies to feed on plastic and take nutrients from plastic.' In response, a group of underground activists (led by Scott Speedman) have willfully altered their bodies so they're able to digest plastics and survive on toxic chemicals. "It doesn't mean that I had a specifically political agenda when I made the movie, but I agree with all of those things. If it inspires anyone to action, then that's a good thing." There's a line in the film that says, 'We're creating meaning out of emptiness.' And that's what he does." Their two-person show attracts the attention of a nosy detective (Welket Bungué) and mousy organ registrar (Stewart), as authorities attempt to keep tabs and crack down on these radical mutations.