Dunning Dunning

Instead of your generic dystopic sci-fi, Crimes of the Future is a film about hope. But the film is far from wearing rose-tinted glasses, as it explores censorship, eugenics, bodily autonomy, identity and creativity in a world numb to the bleakness that surrounds it; an emptiness performance artists Saul Tenser and Caprice attempt to provoke with their shows, where Caprice extracts new organs grown within Tenser's body. This film is also, imo, the purest distillation of Cronenberg. He does not do body horror, but body awe, the beauty of physical change potentially lost on audiences in earlier films, like Videodrome, is here on full display. As we live through a time where bodily autonomy is being stripped away (the removal of woe vs wade, the attempt to control transgender people's decisions); we become numb to shock due to the information overload of controversies and horrors at our fingertips; paranoid due to mass surveillance, and having to learn in a new world of pandemics and global warming; while art feels hollowed out, a rehash of its former glory (self-referential) - Crimes of the Future comes along as a message of radical hope. A beautiful film, and in my opinion, the most important of 2022.