Saul (Viggo Mortensen) and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) are big stars on the organ performance circuit, where Caprice performs live surgeries on Saul, tattooing and removing random organs (tumors?) he has grown due to a condition called the Accelerated Evolution Syndrome that serve no real purpose yet. That brings them to the attention of the National Organ Registry, an as of yet underground organisation run by just two people, Wippet (Don McKellar) and Timlin (Kristen Stewart), who very obviously want their part of the pie. Eventualy, Saul and Caprice are offered the body of a dead boy (Sotiris Sozos) by his own father (Scott Speedman) to do a live performance autopsy on, a boy who was murdered by his mother (Lihi Kornowski) because he has grown so many weird organs he in her eyes has stopped being human. Now this is not quite legal, but it's an opportunity Saul and Caprice can't afford to miss. But there are things going on behind the curtains of the performance surgery scene that the two of them can't even dream of, but that might make them the focus of a big conspiracy ...

After years away from the genre he helped to shape, this is David Cronenberg's return to body horror, and even if much of this movie seems reminiscent of his earlier work (especially Rabid, Videodrome, Crash and also eXistenZ), he certainly has lost nothing of his edge, creating fittingly disturbing images, constantly going for the grotesque and even surreal, and at times following a certain nightmare logic. And the dark irony the film shows every now and again becomes the gruesome rather well, too. Plus, the ensemble is uniformly first rate, giving the rather over-the-top on-screen goings-on the necessary grounding. The one thing about the movie that doesn't work quite as well is that the script seems to be to clever for its own sake, every now and again going one step too far in confusing the audience, and often running the risk to literally losing its plot - which actually does make Crimes of the Future a fascinating jigsaw puzzle, but one that lacks proper pay-off.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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