Surgery is the New Sex and Also You’ve Taken Too Much Nepalese Hallucinagenic Honey
It’s opening night for David Cronenberg’s latest film, “Crimes of the Future”- his first foray back into feature films in a decade, and arguably his first return to his visceral body horror domain in this millennium. Hailed as the “King of Venereal Horror”, his specialties are what can only be described as “orifice centric”, generally with technology that is powered, or at least controlled, by fingering quivering tumorous goopballs. It’s not always explicitly sexual, but you know, in a deep visceral way, despite never having fingered a tumorous goopball yourself, it’s always implicity sexual.
Unrelated, there is a particular type of honey, generally found in Nepal- due to a slightly unique poison found in the pollen of Himalayan cliffside flowers, the bees create a honey colloquially known as “mad honey”. This honey can lead to poisoning and death in large quantities, but have hallucinatory properties in smaller quantities. Xenophon, Aristotle, and Pliny the Elder all wrote about this honey use both as an inebriant, and allegedly used to turn the historic tide of battle in a few conflicts where invading armies were given tainted honey.
You ate 20 grams of the cloyingly-sweet mad honey in anticipation of the movie, because the internet allows for poor ideas to be realized and why even have Stubs A-list if not to risk vomiting, diarrhea, and coma in theater? This is the first time you’ve tried said honey. You’ll be writing your entire review of the film while addled on this Nepalese honey of madness.
WARNING: light, non-plot-centric spoilers to follow. However, time is an endless cycle, and everything that can happen already has, so revealing things that are yet to be is both inevitable and meaningless. Time is a flat circle.
As the lights dim in the theater, you notice the walls seem to be closing in. Every sound is incredibly loud, every color garishly saturated. Nicole Kidman advises that the movie theater is pretty cool, and you have never experienced her plea to go to the movies with such a sizzling intensity.
This is sensory overload- the movie begins as you wonder if you’ve made a good adult decision.
A child eats a plastic trash can and is smothered to death by his mother. Ten seconds into the film and filicide has already casually been tossed about. You feel waves of nausea as the grayotoxin from the Nepalese rhododendron pollen courses through you, and experiencing all this with your sensory knob turned up to 11 feels… not regrettable, but something regrettable-adjacent.
Here we are, set in a vague European environment where every surface looks filthy. Humanity has evolved to a post-pain, post-infection state, so no one even bothers washing their hands, much less ANY SURFACE. Everything is crumbling. Everything is rust, decay, and filth. The walls of the theater pulsate a little bit, and Viggo Mortinson awakens from his Fiat-sized sleeping tumor. Everything that isn’t covered in dirt is a tumor.
Are barnacles tumors of the sea? Once dried out, on land, can they be classified as dirt? What is dirt, if not dried up land barnacles? Do we brush our teeth with sea tumors of the Miocene?
The light from the screen hurts your eyes, and the sound vacillates between an overwhelming roar and deafening silence.
This man has too many ears. What’s the right number of ears? Two is above average, you suppose, but this is waaaay too much above average. Is this what excellence looks like? His undulating dance borders on hypnotic, and you accept him into your heart..
EVERYONE. KEEPS. ORGASMING. Some might call this gratuitous. But those are thoughts for the old world. For the old sex.
At least you have the Q&A to look forward to. AMC has promised David Cronenberg will explain all of this.
This feels like the logical conclusion to Cronenberg’s work. Eroticizing transhumanist body modifications is what you signed up for, and it’s what you are getting.
Your head hurts, and this feels a little weird. This plot feels slightly harder to follow than the dystopian sex movies you were educated on- Cafe Flesh didn’t get this cerebral. Or did it?
A naked woman writhes, nested in a biomechanical sarcophagus, as skeletal automatons articulate scalpels above her pert nipples. Oh god, is this about to awaken something? Is this how one gets kinks? The blades descend and oh god nothing is awakened. This is terrible. Turns out bladeplay is not your new fetish.
Kristen Stewart delivers the most staccato, twitchy performance that a human could possibly muster, and you suddenly can’t remember what the appropriate level of twitchiness is. The motions of the characters feel like the movements of a classical piece, with slow, syrupy deliberation from Léa Seydoux offering the legato undertones.
You twitch and melt to the beats of the movie, because you are a ball of muscle, sinew, and honey.
Bowellingus is now a thing. No one utters the word in the movie, but you know bowellingus when you see it, and you done saw it. Intestines were tongued from exciting new tummy orifices.
Every plot point in this movie is issued by a character performing a completely unmotivated exposition dump. The movie is entirely world-building and character building- Cronenberg has wound up characters like savage, visceral toys, but we never get to see where they go, exactly, and the nude, mumble-talking medical nymphs behave erratically. But who’s to say what is erratic and what is predictable? How do humans interact again? Is eating always this horrific?
You’ll be able to ask Cronenberg. All will become clear.
Except David Cronenberg doesn’t show up. You don’t know why he unceremoniously dropped this AMC from his tour of LA, but as the lights come up, you’re disappointed that you don’t get to ask him what his top ten orifices are. You stand up, a bit dizzy, and leave in a state of partially-aroused beffudlement.
Cronenberg absence aside, what a fascinating experience! 4 out of 5 gaping body holes.
