Crimes of the Future (Canada/France/Greece: David Cronenberg, 2022)

 Crimes of the Future (Canada/France/Greece: David Cronenberg, 2022: 107 mins)

Alexander, Travis. "Power and Flesh." Aeon (October 31, 2025) ["The reigning biopolitical disputes hinge on deceptively simple questions: what is the body for? What should we do with it? Are there levels of biology where a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind? If a human body changes (or is changed) beyond a certain point, does it stop being an altered human body and become, instead, something else? There’s no shortage of modern artists and thinkers wrestling with these questions. The choreographer Meg Stuart pushes bodies to extremes of movement; the multimedia artist ORLAN and the transgender artist Cassils use performance to test the boundaries of flesh and identity; another performance artist, Stelarc, stages the body as machine, grafted with prosthetics. Patricia Piccinini’s sculptures imagine hybrid anatomies, while the films of Julia Ducournau – director of the body horror Titane (2021) – and Claire Denis probe bodily desire and transformation. In scholarship, Yuval Noah Harari tracks the future of the human species, Kate Crawford critiques the bodily costs of AI, and Paul B Preciado theorises on gender transition and pharmacopolitics. And yet, few voices have been as persistent – or as transformative – as David Cronenberg’s. Since the 1970s, he has been cinema’s great anatomist, staging dramas of growth, decay and mutation. Over the decades, his vision has shifted: from a romantic belief that altered bodies deserve celebration, to a more careful insistence that people should be free to alter themselves only if they choose. The arc feels natural, but it is also urgent right now. At a moment when the fight over bodies threads through disputes on everything from vaccines to elder care, Cronenberg offers a framework we need: a way to affirm bodily autonomy without stoking the panic that casts every transformed body as a threat. His cinema points toward a politics of protection – one that secures the vulnerable while refusing to weaponise their difference, and that shows how the defence of bodies can be a form of solidarity rather than a spark for fear."]

Booker, M. Keith. "The Imagination of Deterioration: Dystopia, Climate Change, and the Society of the Spectacle in David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future." Comments on Culture (ND)

---. "The Imagination of Deterioration: Human Exceptionalism, Climate Change, and the Weird Eco-Horror of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future." Monstrum 6.1 (June 2023) ["To an extent, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future (2022) represents a rousing return to the body horror with which its director exploded onto the independent-film scene in the 1970s and 1980s. In this case, though, the film updates Cronenberg’s earlier concerns via an especially strong focus on the impact of environmental deterioration on human beings and human society, placing the film in the realm of eco-horror as well. The action of the film occurs in a decaying near-future world in which climate change and other worsening conditions have led not only to a general decline in the quality of life (both material and emotional) but also to strange (and sometimes macabre) mutations in the human body itself. The strangeness of these climate-related mutations places Crimes of the Future in the realm of ecological horror, and especially of the recent turn toward the “weird” in eco-horror. Nature seems to have been almost obliterated in this future world, but these weird mutations, beyond the control of any of the human forces in the film, challenge the notion that humans stand apart from a nature that they can easily understand, dominate, and control. These mutations also contribute to a growing sense in the future world of the film that things are getting out of hand and that there is no identifiable fix for the general deterioration of conditions, a sense that resonates with widespread attitudes in the world of the early 2020s."]

Brody, Richard. "Crimes of the Future: It’s the End of the World as David Cronenberg Knew It." The New Yorker (June 6, 2022)

Devi, Gayatri. "'A Great Future in Plastics': Crimes of the Future and Cronenberg’s Story of Evolution." Bright Lights Film Journal (October 5, 2022) ["The voice-over tells us that as a result of this neo-venereal disease, his colleague’s body is creating new organs, each one complex, perfect, unique, but without function. Each time these superfluous organs are surgically removed, new ones immediately regenerate inside his body. The patient has begun to steal these organs since he considers his body a galaxy and these new organs solar systems. He cannot bear to part with them. So he steals them. A nurse calls them his “creative cancer."]

Eggert, Brian. "Crimes of the Future." Deep Focus Review (June 5, 2022)

Ehrlich, David. "Crimes of the Future: David Cronenberg’s Beguiling Dream-Noir Finds Hope from Within." IndieWire (Mat 23, 2022)

Goi, Leonardo. "The Current Debate: The Shocks of Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future." Notebook (June 9, 2022) ["It’s in the unsettling, eerily prophetic ideas that Cronenberg’s latest body-horror foray finds its most shocking material."]

Hudson, David. "Cronebergiana." The Current (July 5, 2022)

Loayza, Beatrice. "David Cronenberg’s Tableaux of Pain and Pleasure." The Nation (July 21, 2022) ["The body, that object of eternal obsession, perpetually surveilled and self-policed, is a site of great danger. Errant bodies, then, are as much a threat to the status quo, testing our willingness to embrace the monstrous. In Crimes of the Future, prior to a scene in which a live surgery is staged as a public performance, the phrase “Body is reality” flashes on a small television set: It is through the body, Cronenberg argues, that we experience and make sense of our lives; through the body that ideas, desires, and fears find palpable expression. If his films promiscuously stake out the possibilities of the future and the novel ways in which we might inhabit it, then the body is a testing ground where the ineffable and the unthinkable might be grasped for the first time."]

Rice, David Leo. "Art is the New Puberty: David Cronenberg's Portraits in Flesh." The Baffler (July 7, 2022)  ["The 2020s have come to resemble the ’60s and ’70s in all of these ways and many more. A shortlist would include wild inflation, racial and sexual unrest, bitterness at the prospect of any collective values, escalating conflict with Russia and China, a weak and out-of-touch government, mounting street violence and militia activity, and a massive growth in doomsday cults, psychotropic drugs, and alternative realities. Given such a post-millennium redux, it’s no surprise that the film’s central conceit, that of humanity evolving to meet its moment by metabolizing that moment’s poisoned atmosphere, is so resonant right now. It speaks directly to an era where we, too, must wonder whether we’re evolving. And, if so, into what?"]

Zaretsky, Adam. "Love and Radio." Future Ecologies (June 5, 2023) ["Adam Zaretsky is a bioartist who explores the manipulation of DNA, the fringes of genetic modification, and butts up against the ethical boundaries of science and beyond."]