So many bad reviews. Ouch.

It has been awhile since I've watched a Cronenberg movie, but upon seeing this I was instantly teleported to earlier works: Naked Lunch, Dead Ringers, Crash, eXistenZ. I thought "ahh yes, I remember this guy." It is Cronenberg after all, so one should expect body horror and metaphor.

I very much loved the cult of celebrity and the usual Cronenberg gizmos and gadgets. I felt Kristen Stewart was a good choice for Timlin and it was nice to see a little more range from her. This is great movie if you like to squirm and get a little meta about the message. [spoiler] This really was about making art, opening up oneself for the audience, poking around inside and growing new ideas and works. I also really loved the kid who ate plastic along with the many boat references. Great commentary on all microplastics we are now finding in living organisms especially those harvested from the sea. We really are screwing up this planet. I wonder if Cronenberg knew this latest work might be a little hard for a general audience to swallow? A little box office poison perhaps. Somehow I believe he did... hahaha. [/spoiler]

First off, the title is misleading. It is no thriller.

The ideas and the premise are very original with lots of potential. It is thought-provoking, to a certain extent believable and an interesting topic that was chosen.

The acting was great in my opinion, maybe the best part of the movie along with the atmosphere and the visuals.

The big downside for me in this movie and what makes it hard to watch are simply that there are too many rules that the viewer has simply to accept. The non-existence of pain, the theories behind organ growth, sex...it is too hard to follow, to accept this kind of reality, and most importantly to relate.
I dont know what its like to feel no pain if I would've never felt pain at all - or what it is like to feel pleasure when someone does surgery on me.
I always appreciate movies about outlaws, feeling alienated or the classic discussion how far Art can go - but the deeper topics are so muddled in concepts that you have to constantly dig while watching the movie and being even introduced to more concepts or provocation. You can cut so many scenes and the movie still would have worked - and this is not meant as a compliment.

All in all, it was an interesting movie but not my kind. Not because it was gross.

A lot of art house films run the stereotype of not really holding as much depth as people project onto them, and this is no different. Maybe there's more here, but it's a lot of conjecture. You're going to read into it what you want to, but in the end, you're the one putting in the effort.

The truly great works in this genre give you more to hold onto and something substantive to take leaps from. This just feels like a lot of vague middling. Never too bold. Never too outrageous. But never really cutting either.

There is some obvious commentary on the art world and the cult of celebrity. The ability to get lost in the pursuit of great things and to be misunderstood. But it's nothing as fresh as the material begs to express. It's superficial and there certainly isn't the payoff I was looking for. A lot of loose threads that distract, and a lot of wasted time meandering through pointless juxtapositioning.

That said, there is something here. It's not a wasted effort, and it could even be that the commentary is to an extent on you having to put in the effort to get something out of the piece. But any artwork that has its head up it's ass so much that it compromises itself to make a statement doesn't deserve praise for delivering an underwhelming result..

Interesting ideas and interesting performances, but not all of it ends up working. First, one superficial complaint: the movie feels a bit cheap at times. Lots of simple sets, lots of tight shots, and lots of Viggo Mortensen just crouching on the ground. As another example, the organic based beds and chairs don't feel quite as real (or disgusting) as what I've come to expect out of Cronenberg's practical prop design. According to Wikipedia, the film was originally set for production back in 2003 with a budget of $35 million. While I'm no expert, I suspect that two decades later the actual budget didn't hit that number.

Story wise, the film hits highs and lows in terms of its reliance on exposition. The opening sequence was fantastic, throwing the audience into an unfamiliar world and letting us decipher things on our own. However, pretty quickly we start to get some heavy handed exposition dumps and audience directed metaphor explanations (e.g. the first scene with Wippet, or Timlin's discussion of the "performance art"). Additionally, the story feels a bit disjointed, with not all threads coming together in cohesive ways or getting satisfying resolutions. In fact, one thread felt like it had no resolution whatsoever, perhaps being left on the cutting room floor ([spoiler]the "inner beauty" pageant that Wippet was running that Viggo's character registers for... did I miss something or did that just not come up again?[/spoiler]). Ultimately, I wanted more out of the film's big ideas. It felt like a superficial exploration, presenting a simple binary without enough nuance to keep me thinking.

Not the most enjoyable of watches, it meanders a bit, though 'Crimes of the Future' is most certainly interesting throughout.

I tend to find films like this a little hit-and-miss, as I personally find the constant reaching for shock value or just simple weirdness a bit too forced. And this film does that a few times, but to be fair as the run time was ticking by I could definitely feel myself becoming more and more intrigued by events portrayed on screen.

Cast-wise, Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux great together, very good acting and very good chemistry. Don McKellar (just me who sees a Jeffrey DeMunn likeness in his eyes? probably ...) and Welket Bungué are more than decent too. Kristen Stewart and Scott Speedman give solid showings as well.

A, fair to say, weird one it is, but a weird one that I just about got enough from.