Cronenberg always demonstrates an incredible ability to find the precise boundary where body horror becomes genuinely unsettling without devolving into empty shock — in this film, especially so. He interrogates what happens when the intimate intrusion of technology and mutation into the body becomes ordinary: a world where when pain has all but disappeared and surgery is performance art. Either as a response to these modifications, the body itself begins to evolve beyond the human, developing new organs that the government attempts to maintain a registry of.
This is a strangely polar opposite position on the usual Cyberpunk tropes. Usually, cyberpunk positions the state as the primary antagonist: the surveillance regime that suppresses human freedom while underground rebels seek liberation through technology. In Crimes of the Future , the state is still bureaucratic and invasive, cataloging every new organ and mutation, but I found myself unexpectedly sympathizing with its hesitation to do so. The alternative—the celebration of plastic-eating organs and a post-human biology—felt genuinely horrifying. Cronenberg somehow makes the conservative impulse understandable.
This is what I admire most about Cronenberg. He seems to say, "You don't have to confront these horrors yourself—I will confront them for you." His films become philosophical thought experiments embodied in flesh, exploring futures most of us instinctively recoil from.
Watching it today, I'm reminded of the ongoing conversation around microplastics. Knowing that there are tiny plastic particles accumulating throughout our bodies fills me with a sense of existential dread. Cronenberg transforms that anxiety into speculative evolution.
The films final image stays with you. After spending the entire story in chronic pain, Saul (played by the incredible Viggo) finally consumes synthetic food without his body rejecting it. Finally, he experiences what looks like genuine relief—even a euphoria. His destiny was never to resist the mutation, but to become something capable of surviving a world we ourselves have transformed. It's a profoundly unsettling ending because it suggests that the future may not belong to humanity, at least as we understand and accept ourselves to be.
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