Crimes of the Future 4K 2022

I am very happy to see David Cronenberg returning to his and my favorite body horror, which he has forgotten since Existence. The director's new picture is very close to Videodrome in its subject matter, and in terms of style it stands closest to Car Crash.

Crimes of the Future looks more focused on visuals than on plot and telling a story about a post-apocalyptic world fucked up to the max by humanity. At the same time, these crimes, in my opinion, are more melancholic and closer to a parable than the master's earlier works, although on the screen everything is as before: people develop, people mutate, sometimes into something understandable and familiar, sometimes into something different and horrifying in its appearance or essence.

It's not a new story for David (he wrote the script over 20 years ago), but it doesn't seem quite up-to-date today, and it's much closer in spirit to The Fly, the previously mentioned Car Crash and almost my masterpiece Videodrome, except that the TV has been replaced by a scalpel, but the motto remains the same: "Long live the new flesh!"

If one wants to try to put the picture into the Procrustean bed of genre affiliation, in addition to being a 100% body horror, we have before us an environmental parable with clearly palpable elements of neo-noir, a light detective component and probably a little humor about a couple of fatal not-so-beautiful women who are skilled with the drill and successfully apply their skills several times throughout the film.

A good genre work by an aging maestro that delivers an unpleasant verdict on humanity (the director practically buries it, it seems to me, without giving it even the slightest chance) and yet prompts us not so much to think about what we are doing and where we are going, but rather to go to the shelf, grab a CD of one of his earlier works and spend a great couple hours watching an acclaimed classic of the genre. Not as much as I would have liked, I suppose, but with a sense of purpose, with feeling...