Review of Crimes of the Future (2022) by Mauro_Lanari — 23 Nov 2022

(Mauro Lanari).

Something is wrong with the mind-body relationship, but what? Would natural anatomy cage the psychic identity we self-attribute or is it the mental idea we have of ourselves that is already cramped in itself? By answering: "both hypotheses" one obtains perhaps the most exhaustive answer of Cronenberg's cinema. And then? Is it right or not to try to modify yourself by experimenting, cheer for the ultimate Metamorphosis and Hybrid? Brundlefly's man-machine fusion was a hubris that had to be aborted out of compassion, but this time ecological transhumanism (plasticophages adapted to environmental pollution) that passes through body art surgery or inner beauty in the literal sense gives the impression of being a desired and desirable revolution, a wished psychophysically political anarchy and as such prosecuted by a Foucaultian and Kafkaesque law, a contrast between cosmetics and aesthetics, between those who reject neoplasms by removing them and those who want to preserve them to achieve a definitive organic transformation, the "monstrum" as a prodigious wonder and not as a repulsive horror. It may be Giger, but it is no longer clear whether dystopia or utopia, degeneration or creativity, a tremendous or fascinating, disgusting or attractive, repellent or salvific goal. The algid detachment of the director, who defines himself more and more as afferent to conceptual art, whether Burroughs or Ballard, and a work more interested in the manifesto than in its manifestation, do not help the fruition. Last but not least, perhaps it would have been more appropriate to title the film "Crimes of the Past". During these past decades there have been the ORLAN performances, mass piercings and tattoos, the endless cinecomics saga on mutants, the virtualization of social relationships.