When you think body horror, you think David Cronenberg. But he doesn’t like it that way. For years, Cronenberg’s unique brand of genre films with emphasis on the human form has led to a strong association between himself and the subgenre. With films like The Fly and Videodrome under his belt, it is easy to understand why critics consider Cronenberg the godfather of the genre. And in 2022, he finally returned to a more heightened type of genre picture after making more grounded dramas for many years. Crimes of the Future was released in 2022, and the film marked Cronenberg’s first genre picture of the 21st century. After 1999’s high-concept sci-fi thriller, eXistenZ, Cronenberg shifted to making more grounded, dramatic films like A History of Violence or Eastern Promises. Crimes of the Future reunited Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen (their fourth collaboration) and brought Cronenberg back to the world of science-fiction, resulting in one of his most salient and richly textured films yet.
‘Crimes of the Future’ Was Billed a Return to Form, But David Cronenberg Doesn’t See It That Way

The conversation around body horror bled through just about every interview Cronenberg gave in the promotional tour for Crimes of the Future. But Cronenberg doesn’t care for the term, or genre classifications in general. He told Entertainment Weekly while doing press for the film that genre distinctions meant little to him, and that he approaches every film with the same mindset. There is a story to tell, and he will tell it with whatever images or ideas are most effective for getting that story across. Cronenberg said, “[Crimes of the Future is] no different from A Dangerous Method or Cosmopolis to me,” expressing that his narrative and stylistic approach remain the same regardless of how critics, media, or audiences want to label each film.

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That isn’t to say that Crimes of the Future is not notably different from his recent works. The film is a return to a more heightened approach to storytelling compared to his other 21st century work. But the act of reducing the film to body horror, a field Cronenberg refuses to claim any authority in, flattens what the film is actually accomplishing as a politically urgent, satirical, well-crafted piece of storytelling.
David Cronenberg Satirizes the Empty Provocations of Body Horror in ‘Crimes of the Future’

In the aforementioned Entertainment Weekly interview, Cronenberg said he saw body horror to be more of a marketing and critical perception than something he considers when telling a story. The marketing for Crimes of the Future proves that in a way. An image central to the promotion of the movie was that of “Ear Man.” This is a figure whose eyes and mouth have been sewn shut, while extra human ears have been surgically attached all over his body. The image is exactly the kind of thing that you might look at and call “body horror,” and Cronenberg knows that. The difference is that Ear Man is not meant to be taken seriously in this film; he is roundly criticized by Saul Tenser’s business associate as a poor hack of an artist. This scene is quite telling in how Cronenberg views the label of body horror. Contortions of the human form are visually striking, but without the storytelling and themes that give them meaning, they are nothing more than empty provocations. While the trailers and posters emphasized Ear Man’s significance in the story, Crimes of the Future is about a lot more than the shock of body horror.
‘Crimes of the Future’ is One of David Cronenberg’s Most Politically Urgent Films

Image via NEON

“Body is reality.” These three words are repeated throughout Crimes of the Future, and they echo as Cronenberg’s way of reaching out of the screen, shaking the audience, as if to say: This is not a horror movie. This is real life. The issues addressed in Crimes of the Future range from bodily autonomy to environmental health, and all have real-world implications. Reproductive rights, the persistence of microplastics in the environment and the human body, climate change, all of these are things that are having real, urgent impacts on the lives of billions of people, even if they don’t know it yet or don’t seem to care. Yes, Crimes of the Future is a work of science-fiction, but it is one that feels, in many ways, close to a scientific reality that we would be wise to avoid. The scariest thing about the film? Cronenberg originally wrote Crimes of the Future decades ago, and he barely had to change a word of it to work in the 2020s. He compared the plastic-eating revolutionaries to Jonathan Swift’s famous “A Modest Proposal” essay, which satirically suggested that poor people sell their children to be cannibalized by the upper class. The point being, the environmental horrors of Crimes of the Future are very real, and we are at a global impasse where we must decide how to address them. Of course, reality is as strange as fiction because it is now known that plastics already exist in microscopic forms throughout our bodies. And bodies are as politicized as the environment, which inspired Cronenberg to make a movie regarding the question of who owns what when it comes to the human body. All of these issues converge in our real world just as they do in Crimes of the Future. The political and social urgency of these thematic ideas makes Crimes of the Future one of Cronenberg’s most biting, bold, ambitious projects to date, and on top of that, it is a stylish, thrilling, cinematic experience that is aging into its status as one of his greatest achievements in film.