The sci-fi story Crimes of the Future puts the king of body horror back in his slimy saddle

polygon.com:

“Surgery is sex, isn’t it?” That question isn’t the only moment where David Cronenberg’sCrimes of the Future feels like it’s summing up the filmmaker’s whole squishy, creepy, body-horror deal. But it is the most succinct summary. So it makes sense that the movie returns to similar phrases and ideas as it rolls out its near-future science fiction world. At one point, a character refers to less gory physical expressions of lust as “the old sex” — which not only shrugs off the entire past history of physical bodies but also sounds like a riff on the “new flesh” extolled in Cronenberg’s 1983 sci-fi horror nightmare Videodrome.

Yet for a movie in which characters who aren’t doctors repeatedly perform surgery on each other, sometimes for art’s sake, Crimes of the Future doesn’t feel as confrontational as past Cronenberg provocations, like 1996’s Crash. (That’s the one about people who consider vehicular accidents sexy, not the Oscar-winning racism mess.) At times, it’s downright weary.

Set in an unspecified future when humankind has begun to evolve away from feeling pain, the movie follows performance-artist couple Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux), whose work features an unusual double act of “desktop surgery.” Saul grows new organs, which Caprice tattoos and then removes in front of an audience, using a fleshy, rubbery, extremely Cronenbergian control panel that controls bony, extremely Cronenbergian surgical instruments. Are Saul’s growths advantageous or harmful? Without traditional pain, it’s hard to tell — though in spite of his ability to withstand repeated surgeries, Saul doesn’t exactly look comfortable. He appears to hover somewhere between ennui and agony.

Saul and Caprice’s act attracts the