Crimes of the Future (2022)

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022) — dir. Cronenburg
A beloved performance artist, Saul, sprouts new organs — as humanity is wont to do these days — and his domestic and creative partner Caprice surgically removes them to a captive audience. But with the government registry on one side and a strange subculture of plastic eaters on the other, Saul must listen to his own body, often in chronic pain, about what evolution means for him.

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 corporate-controlled 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 to resist quite understandable.

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 transcendent euphoria. His destiny was never to resist the mutation, but to become something capable of surviving a body that we have transformed ourselves. 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.

Watch the film here: YouTubeCrimes of the Future