2022 Cannes Critics’ Panel: Day 7- David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future

This year’s Canadian entry has a touch of Greece in it as David Cronenberg shot his latest film with a whiff of the Aegean sea. His sixth trip to the competition, Cronenberg first entered with a splash with Crash (1996), Spider (2002), A History of Violence (2005), Cosmopolis (2012) and finally, Maps to the Stars in 2014. Almost a decade later he arrives with Crimes of the Future which features Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, and Don McKellar.

Here is the storyline directly from the Neon folks: As the human species adapts to a synthetic environment, the body undergoes new transformations and mutations. With his partner Caprice (Seydoux), Saul Tenser (Mortensen), celebrity performance artist, publicly showcases the metamorphosis of his organs in avant-garde performances. Timlin (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.

We thought that Triangle of Sadness was the first bonafide hit of the festival, but it lost some feathers along the way. We had to wait until day 7 for our critics to push a title in front of the pack and while we’ve seen higher graded films in previous years, Crimes of the Future was give 3 perfect scores of five stars — for an average of 3.6.

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