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Viewer Advice: Contains graphic scenes of surgical procedures.
David Cronenberg casts Viggo Mortensen, Kristen Stewart and Léa Seydoux in this darkly sensual body-horror film set in a dystopian future where humans have started to evolve in unexpected – and sometimes unwanted – ways.
In an industrial future, human evolution is accelerating grotesquely. Bodies are sprouting extra organs and losing the sensation of pain. Eating and sleeping require Freudian machines. And performance artist Saul Tenser, whose partner Caprice surgically removes his superfluous organs, has become a figure of notoriety. But the National Organ Registry seems suspicious of Saul – and its skittish, intense investigator has a more-than-professional interest in him. Meanwhile, an anarchic cult is embracing change in a shadowy underworld.
Cronenberg’s (The Fly, MIFF 2019; eXistenZ, MIFF 2017) first film in eight years sees him returning to his body-horror (dis)comfort zone, mingling the medical, the erotic and the technological. Mortensen, Stewart and Seydoux – the last of whom also stars in MIFF 70 film One Fine Morning – all give enjoyably outré performances in this spectacular film that palpates the possibilities of how humanity will adapt to an ecosystem we’ve destroyed.
“The ideas that Cronenberg puts forth are powerful and poignant; his subject is the effort to make art amid a despoiled cultural environment and debased cultural consumption.” – The New Yorker