The artist Saul Tenser and his assistant Caprice perform performances of removal of new organs of a tumor nature from the body of the same Tenser. When the two decide to register the patent of the new organs generated in the artist’s body, their path crosses that of a sect dedicated to eating plastic, already in the crosshairs of the police of the Nuovo Vizio unit.
By blending the aesthetics of his first films and the psychoanalytic elements of his latest works, David Cronenberg creates an unusual, unsettling science fiction film, in which vintage aesthetics take a back seat to radical content.
The prostheses and technological devices seem to be made according to an ancient idea of ​​the future that characterized the eighties – the alien visions of H.R. Giger, even more than Cronenberg’s first films – while the story told completes and canonizes the work of eXistenZ and Crash, between self-quotation and updating of a contemporary poetic.
Crimes of the Future invites us to get lost in a distant future which is at the same time a likely continuation of our present. A gray and almost uninhabitable world, in which the overstimulation of the body, stimulated and excited even during sleep or during the meal, has led to exasperation and at the same time to a cancellation of pleasure and pain. In this flat and horizontal panorama, the film itself chooses not to evolve and to proceed in accordance with the music of Howard Shore, like a mononote staff that expands static emotions.
The noir intrigue, which sees Tenser grappling with an investigation into a murder and a sect of plasticophages, is the pretext to explore a new dimension of sensuality, which has extended the profanation of the body from the exterior to the interior, replacing sex with surgery. The hunger for celebrities and the adoration for artists is linked to the sense that they are able to attribute to activities that in reality everyone seems to practice: Cronenberg insists precisely on this contrast, in a possible allegory of the relationship between art and mass consumption, embodied from the conceptual performances of Tenser on the one hand and the plastic eaters on the other.