What the fuck did I just watch?

The first time someone carves a zipper into their abdomen and invites a lover to unzip it so they can tongue each other’s internal organs, you’d be forgiven for thinking Crimes of the Future has just delivered a final climactic thrust. But no – it’s not even foreplay. It’s barely even flirting. David Cronenberg’s 2022 offering isn’t just body horror. It’s body theory, an academic paper wrapped in a skin suit and stitched together with surgical poetry and philosophical dread. It’s the kind of film that takes transhumanism and dares to ask: what if we didn’t merge with technology, but let evolution itself get weirdly horny about it?

Set in a world where pain has all but vanished and people grow new organs for sport, Crimes of the Future feels like the afterparty of human biology – when everyone’s too tired or too altered to care what’s natural anymore. Viggo Mortensen, hunched and rasping like a noir gargoyle with chronic digestive trauma, plays Saul Tenser, a performance artist whose body won’t stop evolving. Alongside Léa Seydoux’s Caprice – part partner, part surgeon, all appetite – he turns his internal mutations into public exhibitions. It’s performance art as autopsy, and it’s not even the most disturbing thing happening in this crumbling, clammy future.

Cronenberg doesn’t offer clarity. He offers flesh – mucosal, tumorous, hinting at purpose but resisting interpretation. It’s a film of mouthfeel: moist, choking, not quite rotten but with the chemical aftertaste of something grown in a lab and served cold. Dialogue isn’t delivered so much as exhaled with effort. People talk like they’re suppressing nausea or mid-way through passing a kidney stone of ideology. Kristen Stewart, jittering with erotic unease as a government functionary with a fetish for surgery, spends most of her screen time looking like she’s about to combust from sheer repressed ecstasy. She delivers the most queasily amusing performance, and also the creepiest, embodying Crimes’ tightrope walk between absurdity and sincerity.

But it would be a mistake to dismiss it as pure provocation. Crimes of the Future is a meditation, albeit one scrawled on the back of a biopsy report. Cronenberg isn’t asking whether the human body can be art – he’s asking if it can be owned, and what happens when governments, corporations, or lovers start claiming intellectual property over your spleen. There’s a bleak hilarity in how bureaucracy has caught up with evolution: underground organ registries, performance art licensing, clandestine autopsies. The revolution won’t be televised – it’ll be vivisected.

This isn’t a film made for digestion. It festers. It’s stubbornly uninterested in pleasing its audience and even more uninterested in explaining itself. It gives you riddles wrapped in tissue, dares you to find meaning in scar tissue and industrial grime. For all its grotesquerie, it’s surprisingly restrained – a clinical film about chaos, cold to the touch but seething underneath. It’s not sexy, not thrilling, not even especially entertaining by traditional standards. But if you’re willing to meet it where it lurks – somewhere between a dream and an autopsy slab – it offers a rare kind of cinematic communion.

Crimes of the Future doesn’t ask to be loved. It wants to be metabolised. Or maybe not even that – maybe it just wants to be acknowledged, like a lump you’re pretending not to notice. Cronenberg has made a film so committed to its thought experiment, so unwilling to offer a safety net or a satisfying answer, that the most honest reaction might still be: what the fuck did I just watch? But maybe that’s the point.