Crimes of the Future, review: Cronenberg’s newest body-horror is sick

The veteran master of gore returns, with Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux playing a performance-art duo – but the act feels a little passé

Crimes of the Future, review: Cronenberg’s newest body-horror is sick – and not in a good way

Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) has a problem, but he has chosen to treat it as a gift. Afflicted by a recently discovered medical condition known as “accelerated evolution syndrome”, his body keeps producing new and inexplicable internal organs – which, for his survival, have to be excised.

Rather than let the things go to waste, though, he sells tickets for the operations, which he and his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux), a former trauma surgeon, stage as elaborate performance-art pieces. They’re far from the only show in this not-so-distant dystopian town: live surgery acts are cropping up everywhere, like mixtures of louche poetry salons and Victorian anatomy lectures. But Saul’s novel body-parts give the pair the leading creative edge, and the two have become celebrities in their field. Call it “living off the fat of the gland”.

You have to wonder if David Cronenberg, the incubator of such monstrosities as Videodrome, The Fly and Crash, sees Saul as something of a kindred spirit. And Crimes of the Future, which premiered in competition at Cannes tonight, certainly feels inward-looking in more ways than one. It sees the 79-year-old Canadian master return to a vein of overt body-horror from which he has tacked away since 1999’s eXistenZ; it’s also his first entirely self-generated project since then, with no independent scriptwriter or preexisting source material to build on.

The film shares a title with one of his earliest works, though nothing else. Gurgling along on its own nightmare logic. It delivers the kind of narcotised grotesquerie every fan will be hoping for – a typical tableau pans over Mortensen and Seydoux lolling nude upon a plinth, while they’re tenderly slashed at by bio-mechanical scalpels. Before the festival, Cronenberg predicted that some audience members would be scrambling for the exits within the opening five minutes, and at the film’s first screening he was proven right. The film begins with a mother suffocating her eight-year-old son Brecken, who like Saul is an organ spawner: he’s been blessed with a neo-digestive system capable of leeching nutrition from plastic.

The poor lad’s father (Scott Speedman) is a member of a cult which has been trying to engineer that very evolutionary shift, and wants Saul and Caprice to use the boy’s cadaver in their act to deliver a public moment of triumph. Meanwhile, there’s the Inner Beauty Contest to prepare for – a sort of surgical Oscars, in which Saul’s viewed as a frontrunner for Best Original Organ – as well as the attentions of various mysterious parties.

One is the National Organ Registry: a clandestine government department run by Don McKellar and Kristen Stewart, which catalogues the weird and wobbly output of bodies such as Saul’s. There’s also LifeFormWare, a biotech firm who created the Sark, Seydoux’s sarcophagus-like dissection apparatus, as well as various other grisly contraptions. And sniffing round the margins is Welket Bungué’s detective from the New Vice unit – which was formerly and less sexily known as Evolutionary Derangement. “Sexier means easier funding,” Bungué points out.

The camera is prowling and unexcitable, the locations rusting and half-deserted, the practical effects old-fashioned. A massage chair called the BreakFaster palpates the human body during meals in order to maximise alimentary efficiency: it resembles a raw chicken on top of some dinosaur bones, and thrashes around like the puppeteer got drunk. Mortensen, often cowled and wheezing, cuts an ambiguous figure, while Stewart’s role is marginal: she’s a bureaucrat turned groupie who wants to be a part of Saul’s act.

Seydoux gives the film’s best performance: even wrenching moments are played at a glassy remove. But unlike Cronenberg’s Crash, which shook Cannes to the core in 1996, there’s no shock of the new in Crimes of the Future – a crucial requirement for every true festival coup de scandale. A provocation aimed at those who booked tickets the minute the trailer hit Twitter can’t help but feel a little passé.

Cert TBC, 107 min. Screening at the Cannes Film Festival. UK release TBC