Living in a sparse looking future, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) has a body that can create new organs. Because of this he and his partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux) perform surgeries to each other privately and in public. Saul is usually the one lying down the surgery table in public but Caprice isn’t so shy now. Also, because they’re famous as underground performance artists, they attract a lot of hangers-on with agendas. One is Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), mourning a dead plastic eating son who could have been a possible mutant. Two more include government workers, Timlin (Kristen Stewart) and Wippet (Don McKellar), attracted to Saul’s catalogue work. And two more include the dangerous Berst (Tanaya Beatty) and Router Nadia Litz) from a private technical company.

This gets director and writer David Cronenberg to revisit an idea from a short he made back in 1970. The short just had people walking around brutalist Toronto and had kernels of an idea about someone who’s mourning. In this iteration of Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg puts mourning as a b-theme while focusing on characters with obviously complex relationships. On the surface, Caprice and Saul attract people like Lang, a trend noticeable to policemen like Cope (Welket Bungué). Lang has enough going that he should not be approaching anyone with any modicum of fame or notoriety. But because he does, Cope asks Saul to ingratiate himself with Lang to see if he’s up to anything (he is). Saul adds undercover cop to his duties, already feeling heavy because he also has to manage Caprice.

All bloggers and critics have written their words about Cronenberg and how he perceives the human body in film. I probably need to dust off history texts to remind myself of how his brain fits within the 1970s. Although a budding filmmaker can say a lot during a decade that saw sex and wartime violence collide. More recent decades make sense though, as his ideas come back in vogue within the 2000s hyperactive fascinations. His critique of crass capitalism during the 2010s feel like a better fit on paper but that didn’t work. This film comes at the right time with social fascination about bodies and sexuality that cross many conventional borders. It feels less trans and more queer, with plot points about Caprice’s hunger for the spotlight and the pageant story line.

Bringing up queerness is one of the things I’m ambivalent about with Crimes of the Future and Cronenberg. I’m not the first queer blogger to point out that Crononberg’s idea of queerness is using heterosexuals as protagonists. I shouldn’t talk because even in a film of weirdos I find Lang’s disheveled quality attractive out of everyone. In fairness to me, everyone should love a good father who sees his son as a groundbreaking new species. In all seriousness though, I don’t know why the most interesting relationship is the one between Lang and Saul. Theirs is mutually parasitic, the last thing that Saul needs because he doesn’t like what his own body is doing. What’s on the inside reflects the outside – this feels like surface criticism but it’s true within a fascinating film.

Crimes of the Future is available to stream on MUBI, which-