Crimes to the Future opens with a striking image that is likely to slip into the back of our mind as the story unfolds, only to gain meaning retrospectively, maybe strengthened by a second viewing. In the only shot filmed in the sunlight, the wreck of a liner lies on the shore obstructing the horizon. Huge, rusty, and abandoned. The camera lingers on the carcass, then tracks back to reveal a long-haired kid, squat in a vaguely simian pose, playing with a stick, the muddy sand, some pebbles. ‘I don’t want you eating anything you find in there, you understand me?’ A monument to the failure of evolution as we thought of it for centuries, next to that of a new generation that’s about to establish itself. And from there, we are thrown into the dark.
People craving for physical pain. Parents killing their own offspring. New vices and inner beauties. Prophecies such as ‘surgery is the new sex’ and ‘sexier means easier funding’ echoing like mantras. Performing, appearing, competing. And plastic eaters. ‘Because our bodies are telling us it is time to change, time for human evolution to sync up with human technology. We’ve got to start feeding on our own industrial waste, it’s our destiny.’ Is that what it is—destiny—our very crime of the future?
Cronenberg orchestrates a cerebral noir without fedoras, trench coats, or rain, where environmental questions intersect a provocative reflection on the meaning, purpose, and boundaries of art. His daring intuition appals from the very first sequence, his passionate lament is loud and timely, but alas the execution—somehow ordinary, at times naff, with dialogues that seem devised to encourage the actors to try and act as bad as they can, succeeding—is not quite up to the exciting ambitions of the concept.
And yet the experience his vision offers escapes the rational thinking it triggers while and after. Despite its flaws, there’s something utterly addictive about it that I can only surrender to. Out of many great films that leave me awed and get me to write down notes and scribbles, here is one that hardly fits in that category, but seduces me completely, making me want to endlessly lose myself in its gloomy meanders.
DOTRICE: Are you afraid of a little emotion?
TENSER: I’m afraid of everything.
