Review of Crimes of the Future (2022) by Captainhowdy — 23 Jun 2022

'Crimes of the Future' plays like classic Cronenberg, getting into levels of weird and unsettling that are reminiscent of 'Naked Lunch.' There are also a lot of the elements Cronenberg is known for, most notably the merging of biology and technology.

However, the film suffers from an unusual problem for directors: Cronenberg has far too many ideas. While other directors will suffer from too few, he has loads of them. He just seems to have a hard time discerning which ones are good or bad or just unnecessary. They all get thrown into the mix, and they are all given far less screen time than they need to develop. In the end, none of them do.

As a result, the audience is also fed a steady stream of characters whose motives are unclear. We meet one, find out a little bit about their background, then move on and don't revisit them until much later on. Characters with no known connection are later shown to have some sort of link, but that link is never made completely clear.

In short, it looks and feels like a Cronenberg film in just about every way you could imagine. However, the muddled plot and half-baked ideas left me much more confused at the end of this film than I was at the beginning.

I'll leave this one for Cronenberg completists only.