Review: CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

One block on the timeline after the near future. Performance art team Saul Tenser and his wife Caprice stage the removal of growths that might be either new organs or tumours with a remote autopsy pod. Body modification and near cannibalistic fetishism are dripping from the avant garde to the edge of the mainstream. An undercurrent group is swelling in numbers and influence in response to the new technology of accelerated mutation and they want to stage their own demonstration with proof of concept that has to do with the unsettling scenes in the prologue where a plastic eating child is murdered by its mother. A strange one to begin with a choc top at the cinema.

David Cronenberg's heralded return to his trademark body horror has been foreshadowed by intimations of extermity, of gore, violence and disruption. I didn't feel much in the way of confrontation watching it and regard the hype as marketing only. The body-mod scenes in this film are not offered for shock value. Most of the biotech design will already be warmly familiar to Cronenberg fans already from his classics like Videodrome. The real power on screen here is the discussion of the distinction between the proffered art, the suggestion that "old sex" has passed its use-by and that now "surgery is the new sex". This is an imagined era of "desktop surgery" where the greater population celebrates the opening of previously qualified practice to all. Cronenberg, while not exactly, trifling with his own legacy, is yet asking us to get used to its testimony and dig beneath it to hear its real voices.

If you go along expecting a bigger, better Videodrome or Dead Ringers think more along the lines of the more studiously subdued fare of the '90s: M. Butterfly or Crash that made less of the other and the marginal than the othering by the greater society. Crimes of the Future looks more like Existenz but it plays far more like Dead Ringers; the notion of the human transition (and its relation to the way we live and what we expect of our lives) is by far the greater burden here.

That said, Cronenberg takes obvious delight in dusting off some old tropes. A business with the ultra-modern name of The National Organ Registry is housed in a run down office that looks like it was old in the 1950s. Eroticism from the invasion of the torso cavity could be from any '70s to '80s Cronenberg shocker. Howard Shore is back in the composer chair, providing a skintight accompaniment for his old friend's film. The underground activist Dotrice's declamations would sit well in Scanners or Naked Lunch.   Then again, this film does not feel like fan service or stylistic nostalgia (despite the recycled title), its underlying gravity is telling us to lift the curtain of the sensational soundbite dialogue and visual grotesquery. One of its most potent themes, pushing at the surface tension is the choice of what we do about this future we have in front of us. Resist, conform, innovate?

If you see this where you cannot pause or rewind, enjoy the dazzle but take care to listen as well as look. That's always been the case with Cronenberg and so it is again.