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Reviews
Crimes of the Future (2022)
Movies Are Hard to Make Sometimes
I will preface this by saying that I have never, in my 7 years of using IMDb written a review for any film, regardless of whether or not I enjoyed it. While I have to include my numerical rating in this review, my primary reasoning for this review is not really to interrogate whether Crimes of the Future was good, but rather, for me to ask a few questions that I hope will be answered in the near future in regards to the production of this film and if unanswered, to hopefully generate some discussion about the struggles of film production for even a seasoned filmmaker such as Cronenberg.
The first 45 or so minutes of the film were everything I had hoped for; an unfettered parade showcasing Cronenberg's disgusting ability to turn the human body into a grotesque peep show. I love this, anyone who loves Cronenberg loves this. But almost immediately after a particular scene in which Seydoux simulates fellatio with an open wound on Mortensen's torso (which was shot quite unimaginatively), the movie becomes a slog in which the characters speak to one another, at length and obliquely about, well, honestly I am not sure what they were talking about most of the time. The last hour of this movie consisted almost entirely of back to back exposition scenes, with, for lack of a better word, boring camera work. Establishing shots were mostly just wide shots showing one side of a particular room with the characters in frame, and then everything else was made up of reverse cuts as the characters spoke to one another. Most of the movie is shot indoors and with as little camera movement as possible, and I didn't understand why that was until after the movie was done and I read about the production.
I generally do not watch trailers/teasers for films I want to watch, and I try to avoid most materials that talk about the production of a film until after I have viewed it. For myself, I find this to be the best way to allow a film to speak for itself when I watch it. So when I was watching the credits roll in my local theater, I thought to myself that there is no way that this is how the film was supposed to turn out. As mentioned, the camerawork and lighting for the film was really quite unimaginative and for a film that relied so heavily on exposition and dialogue I was shocked at how static the camera was. I also noticed that in the credits, a lot of the names sounded Greek, and sure enough at the very end of the credits, what do you know-- it was shot in Greece. Odd, since most of the funding for the film came from Canadian production companies. I took a look at the Wikipedia page for the film; it began filming in August of 2021 and finished about 30 days later in September, and not just that, it was filmed entirely in a single warehouse.
Obviously, one could chalk this up to being another film with potential that lost its spark due to COVID restrictions, but this film was written in 1999, originally picked up in 2003 by Serendipity Point Films (they are still credited in the 2022 release) with a $35 million budget, and was planned to be shot in Toronto and released in 2006. I get it, the film industry can be brutal and call me naive but I would think that Cronenberg having, even at the time the film was originally supposed to come out, a number of critically regarded films would have allowed him to create and produce this film to the best of his ability and in the initial time frame. Instead for whatever reason, the movie was forgotten for almost 20 years, Cronenberg himself said at one point he had no interest in making it anymore, until he or his funders decided that filming in the middle of the pandemic, with obviously limited artistic and monetary resources, was the logical next step. I don't want to hate on this film or Cronenberg, I just want to know what the heck happened with this movie. Why did they film this in Greece just to shoot everything in a warehouse? Why was filming restricted to only a month? What ended up getting cut either in post or in the screenwriting process, to have the final film be made up of so much exposition? Who knows if this shoddy production can be blamed on Cronenberg being contractually obligated to complete this film and he just had zero passion to complete it, or if it is possible he truly had renewed interest in finishing this film but for one reason or the other, COVID certainly being one of them, he was made to rush it. Regardless, this film is, in the few moment's Cronenberg's vision shines through, provocative and still worthy of discussion, and on the other hand it's a perfect example of why movies suck to make.