Is a live autopsy a contradiction in terms?

Whether yea or nay, it is a set piece in David Cronenberg’s latest body horror film, CRIMES OF THE FUTURE.

The film begins with a startling image. A little boys fossicks on the foreshore. A capsized ocean liner lies on its side behind him.

The boy will soon be suffocated by his mother and he will be the subject of a live autopsy.

“The corpse of the creature you call your son!” says the mother to the distraught father. She murdered him because of his proclivity to eating plastic.

He is in fact a prototype sapien, spawned by his sperm donor, a dissident genetically engineering digestive tracts fast tracked to consume the waste created by our industrial world.

This is is an intriguing sidebar to the central story about performance artist, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and his companion, Caprice (Lea Seydoux) She is an ex surgeon and now helps Tenser on and off stage in his public surgery act.

He sleeps in a sarcophagus and eats in a high chair that looks like a chiropractor’s display model. The upside down beetle hammock harks back to Cronenberg’s embedded entomology fetish, his arthropod fixation, so upfront in The Fly, and The Naked Lunch.

Tenser’s show is a blood and cuts extravaganza, where he is delivered of a tumor and cultivates extra organs and appendages to be excised. Talk about a growth industry.

In CRIMES OF THE FUTURE, surgery isn’t just the new art installation, it’s the new sex. Seduced by incision, aroused by suture, impassioned by implant.

 Such is his entrails displaying star power, he is invited to enter an Inner Beauty Pageant! 

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is neo Gothic with Mortensen sweeping through streets of decay dressed as a hooded monk and being propositioned by a cool ghoul in the form of Kristen Stewart.

A companion piece to Cronenberg’s earlier film, Crash, CRIMES OF THE FUTURE is back to the past with a view to the impending.