18. “Crimes of the Future” (2022)
In the near future, humanity has lost its capacity to feel pain, and live surgical shows have become the arthouse blockbuster entertainments of the era. Viggo Mortensen stars as an artist who grows mysterious new organs and removes them in his shows. Over the course of the film, he runs into obsessive groupies, uncomfortably supportive government agencies and a vast conspiracy about mutants who eat plastic. “Crimes of the Future” is not a remake of Cronenberg’s second film, although the organ-harvesting plot harkens back to it. Instead seems to be a weird satire of Cronenberg’s own, unusual place in the art community, funnier than most of his works and bitingly self-aware. Eventually, however, the plot takes hold, the commentary falls off and “Crimes of the Future” abandons almost all its threads for an unsatisfactory conclusion.