Crimes of the Future sounds a whole lot more fascinating than it actually is: it’s a more interesting film to read/write about than to watch, which just goes to show how Cronenberg at this early stage was still closer to a kind of literary, idea-based storytelling, and had not yet mastered the filmmaking side of the equation.
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What are critics saying?
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Gradually, Crimes of the Future becomes a surprisingly thorough and anticipatory working draft of the prototypical Cronenberg body-horror film, dramatizing, with characteristically repulsed fascination, a series of biological mutations that usher in a micro-culture given to cannibalism, pedophilia, and other practices that indicate a looming erasure of personal identity.
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All of Cronenberg’s personal obsessions—the distortion of the body, the grotesquerie of sex—are on display, though the treatment is a bit sophomoric. A curiosity item for hard-core Cronenberg fans.