CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS?

Aside from Dario Argento, David Cronenberg is probably the last giant of horror cinema's Golden Age still working. John Carpenter has effectively retired except for occasional scoring duties, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper and George Romero have gone, and Sam Raimi has decamped to major league superhero movies. And since Existenz back in 1999, Cronenberg himself has largely abandoned the gloopy body horror genre he practically created, in favour of cerebral dramas such as Spider and A Dangerous Method and odd, uncategorisable films like Cosmopolis and Maps To The Stars. Crimes Of The Future is certainly back in his trademark territory: graphic but strangely bloodless gore, twisted flesh, impenetrable and inaccessible characters, musings on humanity and what it will become.

In an unspecified place (some signs are in English, some in Greek), and an unspecified future in which there are no computers and mobile phones are the size of walkie-talkies, pain no longer exists and some people are able to grow new organs inside themselves. Saul and Caprice Tenser (Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux) are performance artists whose show consists of him lying in a modified biomechanical autopsy machine removing strange new organs. (Even as a highly niche novelty act, public surgery is not going to make it past the first round of Britain's Got Talent or any Saturday night game show.) Meanwhile, a woman has killed her young son because of his ability - inherited rather than engineered - to consume otherwise non-biodegradable plastic, and a public autopsy might reveal what this could mean for the environmental future of the human race...

The trouble with Crimes Of The Future (which has nothing to do with his own 1970 film of the same name) is that it's too slow. It's not a long film by any stretch, at 107 minutes, but it's oddly lifeless, it has no pace and no urgency about it, leaving you feeling frustrated. It's also grim and humourless, even by Cronenberg's standards: he's never been the man you go to for laughs but the film has such a sombre and oppressive tone to it that it really needed some hint of levity or lightness, and Kristen Stewart's flighty secretary from the New Organ Registry wasn't enough. Granted, it has its moments of graphic physical gore, as well as frank nudity and sex scenes (left untouched in the UK for an 18 certificate), but it's all weirdly inert and has none of the visceral punch you'd expect, to the extent that Crimes Of The Future actually ends up on screen as boring, believe it or not. Hard to imagine why people allegedly walked out of the film at Cannes, unless they remembered they'd got some ironing to do.

Cronenberg is nearly 80 years old now, so it's perhaps unreasonable to expect the same impact as the full-on grue of The Fly, Videodrome or Rabid, any more than you'd expect the latest Dario Argento to operate on the same level as Suspiria or Deep Red. But I was surprised how little energy there was to it. It has its fascinating ideas, and some strikingly peculiar imagery (such as Mortensen's bed, like a giant insect from Naked Lunch or something, that's designed to move him around to ease his pain), but they can barely survive a film that makes you wonder if you didn't nod off half way through and miss a crucial scene or two. I don't think I did, but I shouldn't even be wondering that, certainly not in a David Cronenberg film. I did struggle with it, and for all that the King Of Venereal Horror has finally returned to the scene of his early, yukky triumphs, it's to surprisingly little effect. A massive disappointment.

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