FIVE MINUTES IN:
Mom tells kid not to ocean trash near shipwreck so he eats a pink trashcan in their bathroom while she watches. Later she waits for him to fall asleep and smothers him to death with a pillow.
Eating trash is deadly for children in the future, especially if your mom’s a straight-up angry psycho.
TEN MINUTES IN:
Kid’s name was Brecken. Mom calls someone to tell his father to pick up “the corpse of a creature he calls his son.” Anyway, scene change—some weird brutalist concrete home. Woman opens curtains while some giant weird hanging chestnut hanging from roots in the ceiling rocks back and forth like it’s trying to hatch. There’s a man inside, Saul, he says the chestnut thing is his bed. Some kind of smart bed that’s supposed to move him while he sleeps to ease his pain. The woman, Paprice, presumably a lover or wife says that she’ll call the organic smart-bed’s manufacturer Life Form Ware. She adds that their tests are complete and that they’ve found a new hormone in his bed.
This is undoubtedly bio-punk, more specifically the genre of pessimistic bio-punk. Bio-punk is like cyberpunk but instead of a future of experimenting with machines, it’s experimenting with biology, the body, animals, life itself.
FIFTEEN MINUTES:
The world is post-apocalyptic, dark, lots of mud-rock stucco buildings. Vagrants huddle around trash, what we’re shown are shanty towns, the poor. A spiky-haired Caprice ushers Saul through the streets like a covered Afghan woman—perhaps he is famous or his body is illegal: their tests have revealed a new organ in his body, like an adrenal gland but also something she says they should uniquely shape. Saul jokingly suggests something tattoo-shaped or a word, “Mom.” In the present they arrive at some small low-level bureaucratic office that registers people’s organs. Perhaps since Saul is growing a new one, it must be registered to the government.
This is pure dark strangeness—a child has been murdered by a mentally unstable mother, an old man sleep sin a rocking chest-nut of a bed hanging from the ceiling, this old man is growing a new organ so it must be registered. Saul and Caprice remind me of Mary and Joseph, riding around the desert in search of a place to birth the Son of God but instead here it is an extra adrenal gland-like organ.
TWENTY MINUTES IN:
Okay, lots to unpack here … perhaps a list would be best before my short commentary.
- In this future, people are evolving and do not really feel pain anymore and are starting to grow new organs.
- “Desktop-surgery” is the hottest new trend, operating on oneself with no anesthetic, and preferably in front of an audience because what little remains of pain to be felt is considered pleasureful to some.
- People don’t wash their hands or their bodies much anymore because infections in humans have disappeared.
- There is a new type of crime, involving human bodies.
- Saul and Caprice are performance artists—Caprice operates on Saul’s body in front of paying audiences, because his body uniquely grows these new organs very quickly.
- There is an older man who works at the Organ Registry, didn’t catch his name, but Kristen Stewart’s is Timlin.
- The organ registry office tattoos new organs to identify them and their effects.
Honestly, I like the irony of attractive people with unattractive names. Sounds like we’re in for some gross stuff. Why is humanity evolving or mutating? Let’s find out.
TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES IN:
Saul looked like he was enjoying getting a tube shoved in and out of his belly by Timlin who also looked to be having too much fun. This is all noticed by Caprice who tells him later at home that she thinks the organ-registry girl is creepy. Saul replies he thinks Timlin’s attractive for a bureaucrat.
Life Form Ware workers arrive to fix or replace Saul’s Orchid Bed. One notices he owns a machine made before their time for autopsy business. The techno-organic machine is called the Sark, Caprice reveals it is “her paintbrush” which she uses to operate on Saul for their show.
Both scenes are rather standard — older woman complains about younger girl to old man who makes things worse by pointing out to the older woman that the younger girl is pretty. I say old man instead of older man because Saul is old, easily twice Caprice’s and triple Timlin’s ages. CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is refreshingly strange. It reminds me of those early 90s movies about those clubs of adrenaline junkies who purposely flat-lined and resuscitated themselves, or crashed cars for thrills.
THIRTY MINUTES IN:
Caprice and Saul perform their desktop-surgery with the Sark machine in front of an underground audience. She presses buttons on a corset-like control pad, while Saul is cut open, his organs caressed and nudged, before finally his extra recently-tattooed organ is cut out. The entire process appears intoxicating to him. Whippet is horrified and Timlin is entranced. While recovering from their performance, Caprice and Saul joke about the size of the extra organ cut out of him and then Timlin comes over and tells Saul she fantasizes about him cutting into her. In a separate area of the venue, the Life Form Ware girls try to pitch another audience member on a small new venture of theirs while a man eats what looks like a chocolate bar. The other man listening to the Life Ware Form girls steals his candy bar, eats a piece, and collapses on the ground, spewing purple goop. The man who the chocolate belongs to, picks it up and leaves.
Other than the gross factor, these recent scenes illustrated how not much as changed in the future and that one man’s drug is another man’s poison due to built-up tolerances of addicts. Don’t bite off a chunk of chocolate, if you’ve never survived eating a crumb of it.
THIRTY FIVE MINUTES IN:
Whippet and Timlin are interrogated by a no-nonsense African cop with a lump on his stomach. He is not convinced that what Saul and Caprice do is art, that Saul is an artist and not a glorified organ donor. Timlin thinks Saul is the “New Picasso.”
The meeting of sense and passion, logic makes sense but it does not create art—unless symmetrical art is involved but this movie is not about numbers.
FORTY MINUTES IN:
A man has his eyes and mouth sown shut. Someone says it is time to stop seeing, stop speaking, to only listen. The camera zooms out and the man with the stitched-shut eyes and mouths, has ears growing all over his body and he starts dancing. A high-level employee from a competitor of Life Form Ware, a company called Klinek, points out to Saul that the stitched man’s extra ears do not work. She recommends Saul visit a doctor who works with her company. The man with the chocolate is the son of the boy who was murdered at the beginning of the film. He comes to Saul and asks if he could perform a new type of show, if the Sark could be used to do an autopsy of his son. The chocolate-eating man promises surprises, tells him art is meant to be daring. He says an artist cannot afford to be scared and asks Saul what he fears. Saul answers—Everything.
A lot of performance art is no longer fictional, especially in the modern realm. It is nonfictional. Contemporary art is more trauma-based voyeurism. The man who eats chocolate that can kill people wants his son’s murder by the boy’s mother to mean something. He is desperate for catharsis, recognition, public acknowledgement of his pain and presence. He claims art is about the lack of fear but Saul says he fears everything. Does he fear that a changing world, has changing rules, no rules? When people now expect nonstop surprises from their bodies, do they expect that same chaos from society? Does Saul fear the chaos of his body and the chaos of modern culture? Their world has gone from, Look At My Pain— to, Cut Off Your Eye Lids and See Nothing But My Pleasure.
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES IN:
Saul runs the idea past Caprice while she lies naked in the Sark being prodded and eventually given multiple small incisions by Saul. This appears to be their foreplay before he joins her inside, naked as well, embracing each other as the machine pleasures them with pain from cuts, scrapes, and shallow stabs. They are worried about the reaction from the radical act of performing a child autopsy in front of an audience, a murdered child especially, and on a stage where adult mutilation is viewed as erotic. The unspoken conclusion is that it would be criminal, pedophilic, but they do not say no but look and comment with hesitation.
As an American, the violence of slicing up the human form does not really faze me much but the naked body is always somewhat shocking—if not as much as in my youth. The Internet has desensitized millions, CRIMES OF THE FUTURE asks what happens when the body itself becomes desensitized? Do our minds follow? Our morals? Our very civilization? Truly disturbing to think desecration could be seen as art or sport, and that mutual love comes from consensually inflicted injury—like an epidemic of radical BDSM.
FIFTY MINUTES IN:
And the film finally offers a twist—Saul is an informal for the police investigating the body-art scene due to his personal connection to it. He says he hates what’s happening to his body, to people, the world. The African cop tells Saul to keep diving in, learn more about the scene, Klinek, their secret doctor, and Saul asks about the mother of the dead boy—who’s revealed to be a cop. The Life For Ware girls admire Caprice’s Sark machine while asking about her relationship with Saul. They undress and pose inside the machine, asking Caprice if they have a future in performance art. It is strange because Caprice is not their friend but also her reaction hints that she enjoys it. I am not sure if it is a joke or if threesome ensues off camera.
Plot twist sighted. More naked women in case any male viewers have fallen asleep in the last fifteen minutes. It is strange to see older women acting like young girls but modern culture is immature and a future probably even severely so.
FIFTY FIVE MINUTES IN:
Saul visits Klinek’s secret doctor. They install him with a horizontal abdominal zipper and register him as a contestant for an underground beauty pageant for extra organ growers. There will be no need to cut him open for access down there. He shows it to Caprice in an alleyway who is initially upset since her Sark usually does the cutting but she then comments on its advantages before unzipping him in order to perform what looks like cunnilingus on his exposed cavity.
Have you ever seen an old man receive oral sex through his stomach zipper? If that’s your thing, enjoy. If your repeatedly muttering, wtf wtf wtf … welcome to my world. In CRIMES OF THE FUTURE, “the new sex is surgery” and the cunnilingus is abdominalingus.
SIXTY MINUTES IN:
Saul meets the mother of the murdered boy at a female penal factory. She claims the boy was invented by her husband to torture her, that her son could only eat plastic and had stinky acidic saliva. He asks what authorities would find if they performed an autopsy on the boy and she answers—Outer Space. She also claims of her husband’s friends, “if you’re a barbie doll then they’re cannibals.” The chocolate-eating man returns to a secret warehouse where his chocolate is being mass-produced. It starts out red, purple, and finally dark brown before being sealed in a wrapper like a candy bar. The chocolate-eating man is very excited of the idea of people seeing an autopsy of his artificial son, of the world seeing what him and his friends are capable of.
The idea of a child that could eat and digest plastic would be revolutionary for a polluted world filled with mountains and mountains of trash. Able to eat plastic trash, there would be no need to clean the planet, the world. Global pollution could continue, be increased.
SIXTY-FIVE MINUTES IN:
Caprice goes to visit a former friend, a model or actress or singer type— a solidly attractive woman who enjoys gill-like slices into her forehead and cheeks very slowly. This woman says she’s tired of being beautiful, of spending most of her life making herself beautiful, her skin beautiful, and now she wishes to do so, with the same slow gradual speed, basically an uglification. Caprice is lured in by this speech, I think she sees herself in this friend, someone tired of being beautiful. She returns to Saul later with a crown of bumps and slices in her forehead, very proud of it. Also, she wants to change the structure of their autopsy performance, she wants to plan it, not Saul. He appears displeased with her visit to her old friend, what that friend does and what Caprice has done to her forehead, and is hesitant to change the structure of their child autopsy.
Snore. Pretty people tired of being pretty, who’ve become so rich they can afford to trick people into pretending to like their own publicized uglification—like reality tv.
SEVENTY-FIVE MINUTES IN:
Whippet reveals himself the head of the underground extra-organ contest and convinces Saul to be the main attraction due to his popularity. Kristen Stewart’s Timlin reveals that she might have to turn in her partner Whippet soon due to his growing involvement in the illegal body-art scene, before asking if Saul could put her in the Sark for one of his performances and operate on her. She kisses him and awkwardly reciprocates before stopping and saying, I’m sorry I’m not very good at the old sex.
New favorite movie line. Kristen Stewart does anxious young woman very well, like she’s not acting.
EIGHTY MINUTES IN:
Saul and Caprice meet with the Chocolate Eating Man, Lang Dotrice. Caprice who was so previously excited nearly cries at the sight of the dead boy she wanted to cut. Saul asks about the boy’s digestive system. His father replies, that it solves the eating problem that they all have, that everyone has. Saul asks the African cop if he should still do the child autopsy show. He tells Saul to do whatever it takes to get to meet Lang’s friends of plastic cannibals. Lang and the cop suggest that the new organs are people’s bodies adapting to their polluted world but that it is happening too quickly, that the old organizations want to get ahead of it before Lang’s smaller group of cannibals does.
What an interesting concept? Organic-eating humans versus inorganic-eating humans.
NINETY MINUTES IN:
They pulled a fast one on us— the cannibals are artificial. They’ve replaced their own organs with the correct combination of new organs from other people to create plastic-digesting systems within themselves, creating a new survival from others’ cancers and deaths. The child autopsy is disturbing and reveals that his entire organ system is composed of extra organs as well, that he is not a natural plastic eater as his father claimed but that in order to propagandize his movement of plastic-eating humans, his son’s healthy organs were all replaced with the extra organs. All of which are tattooed.
If adults refuse to stop producing trash and robbing the young of food, they will need to start robbing the young of their food-eating abilities and leave them forcefully with no choice but the ability to eat trash.
100 MINUTES IN:
Another plot twist, before the show—Timlin replaced all of the boy’s natural organs with tattooed extra organs. The African cop tells Saul that it was all part of an operation, that the powers that be could not allow the reveal of a “naturally unnatural child.” The boy’s father is murdered by the Life Form Ware girls. And Saul who has been struggling with choking, indigestion, and overall pain throughout the film finally tries one of the chocolate bars and does not die choking on purple puke but looks positively orgasmic as if he’s eaten a piece of the most delicious thing in his life.
I expected to be more grossed out by a Cronenberg film but in the age of the Internet, pure graphic spectacle is not enough to turn the stomachs of modern audiences. True disgust, now lies in our hearts and minds since body horror is now a perfectly acceptable part of our daily culture.
Final Grade: B
If you're interested in more reviews, here's a list of other movies I've written about:
Movie review for 2020's "The Night House"
Movie review for 2021's "Hellbender"
Movie review for 2022's "Chainsaw Massacre"
Movie review for 2014's "Mama"
Movie review for 2021's "Cursed"