CRIMES OF THE FUTURE Cast + Crew Q&A | TIFF 2022

Set in a dystopic future where biotechnology-based mutation is increasingly the norm and basic emotions are discomfiting anachronisms, David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future shares obvious similarities with his body horror classics. The ostensible hero, notorious avant-garde performer Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), grows unique tumours, which his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) excises in live performances. His outlaw status and repugnant physical deterioration suggest a familiar trajectory, echoing the accelerated decay and mutations of earlier protagonists like The Fly’s Seth Brundle. But unlike the outlaw figures of Cronenberg’s earlier films (who pursued their mad obsessions in private and functioned as allegorical artist figures), Tenser is a famous artist, and a boundary-pushing one. His function is to suffer for his audience, literally giving up pieces of his body for their enlightenment and, more significantly, their amusement ― an amusement which is heavily eroticized but can’t be separated