In David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, the characters can’t feel pain. Unfortunately, the same is not true for the dozens of people present at the premiere of the horror drama in Cannes, which came out in the middle of the film, unable to perceive exactly what is happening on the screen.
The film also won a seven-minute standing ovation, suggesting it may be the most polarizing title to debut at this year’s Cannes.
The film reunites Cronenberg with Vigo Mortensen (“History of Violence”, “Eastern Promises”) along with Cannes’ favorites Kristen Stewart and Lea Seydou. He also finds Cronenberg back in his science fiction / horror mode for the first time since 1999’s Existenz.
Crimes of the Future may not win the Palme d’Or, but it will receive an award for the strangest film at the festival. Mortensen plays a performer who operates on his organs in a pseudo-sexual ritual in this dystopian universe. Stewart plays an employee at the transplant center who mutters to him in one scene, “Surgery is the new sex.”
The film includes a bloody scene with an autopsy of a child, shots of bloody intestines and characters who orgasm by licking their open wounds. There is also a chair shaped like an elongated human spine that rotates at grotesque angles.
“I’m very excited about your answer,” Cronenberg said after the standing ovation. “I hope you’re not kidding, I hope you think so.”
In a separate screening for the film, critics largely remained in place during the film, with only five people leaving the theater. Although “Crimes of the Future” received some applause after its end, he was not exactly enthusiastic.
Cronenberg has a history of the train with the Cannes Film Festival. He dropped a bomb on the festival in 1996 with the premiere of “Crash”, starring James Spader as a film producer who gets involved with a group of people who turn to car crashes to get sexually aroused. Viewers in Cannes booed the film and left theaters, and even jury president Francis Ford Coppola said some juries were “very passionate” about deciding to award Crash a special jury prize. The jury was much more sympathetic to Cronenberg in 2014 with the premiere of Cards to the Stars, which won the Julianne Moore Award for Best Actress.
The official synopsis of Neon’s Crimes of the Future states: “As the human species adapts to a synthetic environment, the body undergoes new transformations and mutations. Together with his partner Caprice (Lea Seydou), Sol Tenser (Vigo Mortensen), a celebrity performer, publicly demonstrated the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. Timlin (Kristen Stewart), an investigator with the National Register of Organs, obsessively traces their movements when a mysterious group is revealed … Their mission is to use Saul’s fame to shed light on the next phase of human evolution.
Cronenberg made headlines before Cannes predicting that festival-goers would leave the film, but he explained in an interview with Variety: “I didn’t say everyone would leave. The audience in Cannes is a very strange audience. This is not a normal audience. Many people are there just for prestige or the red carpet. And they are not moviegoers. They don’t know my movies. So they may have come out, while the normal audience won’t have a problem with the film. So who knows? But surely a lot of people left when we showed Crash.
According to Neon, “Crimes of the Future” is rated R for “highly disturbing violent content and sinister images, graphic nudity and a bit of language.”
“Crimes of the Future” will hit theaters in the United States on June 3.
Manori Ravindran contributed to this report.
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