Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kirsten Stewart, Don McKellar

Directed by David Cronenberg

Vertigo Films, out now

 

In a dystopian future where pain ceases to exist and the human species adapts to a synthetic environment, the body undergoes new transformations and mutations. 

Writer/director David Cronenberg returns to his trademark body horror genre 23 years after eXistenZ (2002’s Spider was more of a psychological thriller) and while it’s a delight to have him back on his home territory, you never lose that nagging sense of déjà vu and that this has been done much better, many times before.

Celebrity performance artists Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux) have an outré act where the latter publicly performs surgery on the former, removing new organs (tumours) that he has grown in his body. His ability marks a worrying development in human evolution, and the authorities wish to regulate the new organs through the National Organ Registry, represented here by agents Timlin (a misjudged performance by Kristen Stewart) and Wippet (Don McKellar).

From this description you can tell there’s a lot of big ideas in play, but frustratingly they don’t really go anywhere, with the plot taking in the public autopsy of a plastic-eating child. And while there’s undeniably something interesting that Cronenberg’s saying, it’s all played so flat and dull. It doesn’t help that it looks cheap, filmed in a rough part of town with unconvincing visual effects.

Seydoux throws herself into it, at one point writhing fully naked on a surgery table. There’s also two interesting female killers… who also strip off on and jump on the table. Mortensen lopes about in the shadows in a hooded robe like Darkman, trying to add some gravitas, but the movie distractingly unfolds like the David Cronenberg playbook – the VHS abdominal slot from Videodrome, the scary surgical tools from Dead Ringers, the organic weapons from eXistenZ, the body revolt of The Fly… it goes on and on. There’s even a new mantra to replace ‘Long live the new flesh’ – ‘Surgery is the new sex.’

Verdict: Now That’s What I Call Cronenberg: A ‘best of’ hits package performed by an artist focusing on former glories, but nowhere near as effective. 6/10

Nick Joy