The body horror auteur returns to favourite themes, if not the peak of his powers, as Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart star in this playfully grisly tale of surgery as the new sexDavid Cronenberg’s latest feature shares a title with an experimental film he made in 1970.
In the wake of the original Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg would effectively invent, refine and then move on from “‘body horror” cinema, leaving a genre-defining canon of fantasy films that used the mutations of the flesh to discuss matters of life and death.
Since 1988’s Dead Ringers, the Canadian auteur’s preoccupations have been more psychological (notwithstanding the mugwumps of Naked Lunch and the quirky genre return of eXistenZ); from the sexual pathology of Crash, through the stagey Freud/Jung melodrama of A Dangerous Method to the biting Hollywood satire of Maps to the Stars.This new Crimes of the Future
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