Early on in David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future,” a speculative horror-comedy as wildly deranged as it is beautifully controlled, we witness a live demonstration that functions as an art show, a medical procedure and a very public seduction. The nearly naked man encased in the large, mechanized sarcophagus is Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), who has willingly turned his body into a living, breathing, lightly bleeding fresco. The woman working deftly on his insides is Caprice (Léa Seydoux), though instead of scrubs she wears a thin-strapped evening gown, and she uses what looks like a rubbery video-game console to control the scalpels that will slice her partner open.
Saul, his eyes closed and his mouth slightly open, takes intense pleasure in these probing, penetrative sensations. Caprice clearly does as well, breathing heavily as she presses the console against her body and fingers the controls. Whether you savor the sensuality of this sequence or recoil from its grotesquerie (or both), you understand, on a visceral as well as intellectual level, what’s going on. So much so that it’s a little redundant, if amusing, when a mousy onlooker named Timlin (Kristen Stewart) pops up in the next scene to declare, “Surgery is the new sex.”
All of which may provoke two distinct thoughts: First, why isn’t this called “Crimes of the Suture”? And second, it’s marvelous to have Cronenberg back and to behold his undimmed, unparalleled skill at welding the formulations of horror and science fiction to the cinema of ideas. Eight years have passed since his previous feature, the scabrous Hollywood takedown “Maps to the Stars,” and “Crimes of the Future” suggests an amusing, halfway plausible explanation for why it took him so long to emerge from a rumored early retirement.
