If your Friday needs a little dollop of body horror, David Cronenberg (eXistenZ) has got you covered. The redband trailer for Crimes of the Future builds on the creepy promise of the first teaser, digging further into, well, the body. “We’ve all felt that the body was empty,” says a voice that is probably Léa Seydoux. “Empty of meaning. And we’ve wanted to confirm that. So that we could fill it with meaning.”
With meaning in the form of new organs, it looks like.
According to IndieWire, Cronenberg wrote the screenplay for Crimes of the Future twenty years ago, and producer Robert Lantos pushed him to revisit it during the pandemic, as it’s now “more relevant now than ever.” Is… is it? Here’s the summary:
As the human species adapts to a synthetic environment, the body undergoes new transformations and mutations. With his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux), Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), celebrity performance artist, publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. Timlin (Kristen Stewart), an investigator from the National Organ Registry, obsessively tracks their movements, which is when a mysterious group is revealed… Their mission – to use Saul’s notoriety to shed light on the next phase of human evolution.
“The world is a much more dangerous place now that pain has all but disappeared,” another voice says in the new trailer. It almost seems like all the body modification is meant to experience pain, but then, Kristen Stewart’s character puts it another way: “Surgery is the new sex.”
Crimes of the Future is premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, but doesn’t have a firm US release date yet; the trailer just says “June.”
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