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FILMSB-FIL-002

Crimes of the Future

David Cronenberg · 2022

OVERVIEW

David Cronenberg's 2022 film, made from a script he wrote around two decades earlier. In a near future where humans no longer feel pain and grow novel organs, a performance artist has his new organs tattooed and removed in front of an audience.

Surgery is staged as theatre, and the equipment is not clinical. It is bone-coloured, articulated, organic, built by Nicolas Karakatsanis and the production team as furniture that moves.

WHY IT MATTERS

A useful reference for technology that feels bodily, worn and ritualistic rather than polished.

CONTEXT

Cronenberg had not made a body-horror film since the 1990s, and this one is quieter and more verbal than the earlier work. It shares its title but not its plot with his 1970 film.

The design language is the point of interest here: the state bureaucracy, the National Organ Registry, and the domestic objects that are also medical devices.

WHAT TO NOTICE

  1. 01Machines that look grownThe bed, the autopsy module and the breakfast chair are bone and cartilage rather than steel. They are worn rather than operated.
  2. 02Surgery as performanceAn audience, a stage, a programme. The film is consistent about treating the medical as cultural.
  3. 03Bureaucracy in the backgroundRegistries, forms, inspectors. The strangeness is administered, which is what makes it feel settled rather than new.
  4. 04Very little blood for what it isThe restraint is deliberate. The discomfort comes from calm and from sound rather than from spectacle.

CONNECTIONS

EXPLORE FURTHER

  • OFFICIAL / NEONNEON

    NEON also distributed Possessor; the two Cronenberg releases sit together in their catalogue.

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