Sean Parker
David Cronenberg‘s psychosexual body horror film, Crimes of the Future, has revealed its first full trailer. If you haven’t stopped and said WTF today, and you can find the time, two minutes is all it takes. The trailer has enough shocking and borderline grotesque moments to jitter fans’ nerves ahead of the film’s release next month.
Opening with what appears to be a futuristic sonogram on a man, we’re told Viggo Mortensen’s Saul Tenser is growing a new organ. Caprice (Léa Seydoux) then appears to be wearing Resident Evil’s Scarab device from RE5 covered in Avengers infinity stones. Whether this means she’s evil or not, I don’t know, but there’s a good amount of visual information here to at least consider it. The trailer then shows many shots of a capsized ship. Perhaps this is the location where our surgical locations are set?
The dialogue in this latest trailer may hold more clues in figuring out its randomness. A voice says, “the world is a much more dangerous place now that pain has all but disappeared,” and Kristen Stewart’s character announces that “surgery is the new sex.” There is an unmistakable yearning for stimulation by scalpel, equivocal to Holly Hunter and James Spader’s affinity for car crashes in Crash. Yet, the implication of a new organ in Crimes of the Future screams eXistenZ and The Brood while also perpetuating Videodrome’s calls of “long live the new flesh.” Add in that coffin-like medical pod (of some kind), and we also see bits of The Fly fettered in.
The Crimes of the Future trailer almost plays like Cronenberg’s greatest hits. A new film that relies on some unforgettable callbacks in the hopes that his audience will follow him down this road of what the f*ckery. But there are clear allusions working between the scenes here. Viggo Mortensen’s confessions of cutting his new organ from his body and the man whose “all ears,” so to speak, imply disconnections in communication.
If you’re unaware, this is the third time Cronenberg has made Crimes of the Future. His first time was in 1970 via a 62-minute film by the same name that chronicled a dermatologist running The House of Skin. This film also includes a male patient with a body mutation that resembles the symptoms of childbirth by growing new organs that have to be removed from his body. While that seems to be a piece of 2022’s Crimes of the Future trailer, it doesn’t look like it will be a mirrored remake. The second time, and housing some other likenesses, including what appears to be facial penetration of a torso opening, was 1999’s eXistenZ, which was initially supposed to use the same moniker.
Crimes of the Future will premiere this month at the Cannes Film Festival, where it has already been nominated for the Palme d’Or. I believe this is the body horror opus Cronenberg has always wanted to make, and technology is finally catching up to his vision. Regardless, we now have an unofficial Crimes of the Future trilogy and a tremendous catalog of titles from the master of body horror that rest in between. I’m a huge fan of Cronenberg’s and can’t wait to see what he has in store for us here.
Crimes of the Future is set to make your skin crawl in theaters on June 3rd.
