A still from Crimes Of The Future. (courtesy: imdb)

Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux, Kristen Stewart

Director: David Cronenberg

Rating : 4 stars (out of 5)

David Cronenberg, returning to unalloyed body-horror sci-fi for the first time since 1999’s eXistenZ and presenting human organs in a strange and entirely new light, serves up a hypnotic, scalding allegory in Crimes of the Future, his first film since 2014’s Maps to the Stars.

Crimes of the Future probes a weird but tangible world where pain has ceased to exist and the act of developing and harvesting new body organs has been raised to the level of an art form. It lies at the core of an underground live organ extraction shows art that inevitably roils the authorities no end.

It takes a while for one to ascertain what Crimes of the Future really wants to tell us. Cronenberg leaves a great deal of his film open to interpretation. It is intriguing and frustrating in equal parts – the swing from one end to the other is clearly intended and it enhances the joy of watching a 79-year-old agent provocateur holding nothing back

Amid environmental and corporal crises, the characters themselves – each as vivid as the other, irrespective of the length of time that they are on the screen, none more so than a physically expressive dancer with multiple ears swaying to Howard Shore’s music in an evocatively lit nightclub – never seem sure of what they are in search of. They go on regardless, throwing up surprises along the way, as much for themselves as for those that are witness to their performance.

Crimes of the Future, which borrows the title of the 1970 Cronenberg film but little else in plot and thematic terms, forays into the near future where man has developed the power to create neo-organs that could be at peace and harmony with “the techno world we have created”.

That motivation is verbalised by the character that Cronenberg regular Viggo Mortensen plays – this is the actor’s fourth collaboration with th director he first met in Cannes two decades ago. He is Saul Tenser, a performance artist whose organs are extracted before live audiences by his partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux), a former trauma surgeon. The spectators can only gawk disbelief and wonderment, pretty much like the members of the film’s first audience at its premiere at the 75th Cannes Film Festival.

Crimes of the Future is deeply interested in the philosophy, the psychology and, last but not least, the absurdity of the human species straining to retain control over the bodies and its organs as they mutate to put pain beyond the pale of the possible and reinvent the very nature and substance of pleasure. Humanity tilts ever closer towards being machine-like in Crimes of the Future. Those in charge of enforcing order devise ways to keep watch on the radical advancements. The tussle adds frisson to the story.

The film, as prickly as it is playful, appears at times to have its tongue firmly in cheek. At others, it is unsettlingly earnest. Swinging between the perverse and the pure as it follows the work of “an artist of the inner landscape”, it delves into the distortions – and breakthroughs – that “accelerated evolution” has sparked, necessitating the creation of a National Organs Registry as well as a New Vice police unit charged with controlling contraventions of the norms of acceptable behaviour.

Unsurprisingly, Cronenberg teases a series of startling moments out of this brilliant piece of whimsy – even by his standards, organs of the human body have never had such a crucial role to play as they do here. Saul’s journey beyond the pain threshold as the world knows is today and Caprice’s not-so-capricious partnership with the man in acts that are meant to thrill and enthrall, shock and seduce.

Crimes of the Future opens with an eight-year-old boy being smothered with a pillow by his mum, a woman exasperated with his munching on a plastic wastepaper basket. This strand of the plot returns to the spotlight later in the film in the form of the dead boy’s troubled father Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman). The latter approaches Saul with a proposal to stage a live autopsy on the cadaver with the aim of revealing to the world the secret behind the science of the edibility of plastic.

But before Crimes of the Future reaches this pivotal point, Cronenberg introduces other key characters that Saul and Caprice must deal with to pave the way for their continuing attempts to raise their game. First, there is the mismatched duo of Mr. Wippet (Don Mckellar) and his trembly assistant Timlin (Kristen Stewart). The latter – her voice is more a subdued, tentative hiss than a clear-throated, I-know-best intonation – suggests that “surgery is the new sex” and proceeds to develop a crush on Saul. Saul spurns her, asserting that he is not good at the old kind of sex.

Also in the plot is a detective (Welkel Bungue) of the New Vice unit who takes it upon himself to stop the plastic-eaters in their tracks and seeks to draw Saul into his plans

Freedom from pain, the evolving parameters of pleasure, the shifting of the nodes of arousal and unbridled ambition define the labours of these men and women who can not only exist in Cronenberg’s fertile universe but also hold their own in the face of the scepticism and bafflement that they evoke with their boundary-pushing ideas and actions.

Cronenberg’s actors – Mortensen, Seydoux and Stewart – are never less than convincing even when they are thrown into the most grotesque situations. In what is undoubtedly a work of cinematic art that is fertile with possibilities. As Caprice says of Saul’s work – “he creates theatre… it has meaning, potent meaning”.

Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, too, is, in short, the bizarre made brave and beautiful. But isn’t that the least you expect from the Canadian auteur when he is at his most irrepressible?