"Crimes of the Future" - Review

In a not too distant bio-tech future, pain has disappeared, and surgery is the new sex. Performance artist Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and his assistant Caprice (Lea Seydoux) push the limits of art with live extractions of hitherto unknown organs grown and extraced from Tenser in front of a wanting, clamouring audience. We follow them as they meet strange technicians Router and Berst (Nadia Litz and Tanaya Beatty), a sweet-bar chewing stranger with an unusual idea for Tenser's next performance (Scott Speedman); a nervy doctor at the "National Organ Registry" (Don McKellar) and his strange, nervous, somewhat aroused assistant Timlin (Kristen Stewart), in a world where pain, pleasure, organic, synthetic and normal and strange blur together in a cocktail of weirdness...

I love David Cronenberg.
There are no rules, this is a meandering, odd, compellingly strange tale akin to his older stuff ("The Fly", "Rabid", "Videodrome") right down to the deliberately off-kilter acting to help us be desensitised to this painless world the characters live in. It's very much a mood piece, and plot and character growth (Hah!) come second. It's a movie where people will chat about the morality and philosophy of evolution and art and flesh. It's a movie where the plot only really comes into play in the 3rd act, though to be fair the ending is pretty fucking good.
A woman performs fellatio on a man's organs.
A man covers himself in ears.
Chairs help a person eat by moving you around for maximum digestion and pleasure.
Saul and Caprice fuck whilst cutting themselves.
It's "Crash" with a growling, Michael Wincott-esque Mortensen, and I love it. It's arthouse gore with no real rules or conventions or care for typical structures and pacings the audience are used to, it's just Cronenberg being Cronenberg and having stuff to say and explore. Yes, there's a lot of it, and yes he goes all over the place and yes it doesn't conform to traditional narrative too well.
But it's undeniably his film, and enjoyable to boot. I love it, especially if you hold it up as something of a contrast to the cookie-cutter production line swill pumped out by many studios.
Love it or hate it, it's got vision and creativity and ideas.