Crimes of the Future (1970)

 Before David Cronenberg became known for such mainstream, crowd-pleasing entertainment as The Brood, Shivers and Rabid, he wrote, directed, shot and edited a handful of arthouse films and shorts. 1970's Crimes of the future - an hour-long movie that only shares a couple of elements with the 2022 film of the same name - is his second feature.

 Yes, it's about as fucking weird as you'd expect an experimental Cronenberg film to be.

 The movie is shot almost entirely within hallways, foyers and courtyards belonging to huge brutalist structures (what youngsters these days would call liminal spaces) around the Toronto area. There's no dialogue whatsoever; The  stop-start soundtrack consists of glitchy, atonal synth sounds, gurgling water, moaning people... or, distressingly often, complete silence. The script is about as opaque as it comes - good luck making sense of it if you haven't read a synopsis.

 The 'plot' is dispensed by the protagonist Adrian Tripod (Ronald Mlodzik) in short snippets of narration that at first sound random, but slowly do cohere into a (very slight) narrative. I knew going in that the story takes place in a world where a plague's wiped out all women, but if that information is in the movie, I completely missed it. We follow Mr. Tripod as he holds a few different jobs, all of them weirdly sexual (a phrase that I guess fits most of this particular director's work): Running a skin clinic, trafficking women's clothing, doing foot massages - until he falls in with a few conspirators attempting to... well, let's just say that the titular Crimes of The Future, as imagined five decades ago, remain pretty shocking. 

 It's interesting, troubling, and, despite some excitement towards the end... kind of boring. Every scene takes way longer than it should, and there's no getting around that you're watching a film with no dialog about a people doing pseudo-random things in public spaces. Even at an hour, it drags a little.

 I did end up liking it though; There's enough cool stuff here, like a guy who collects random cancer mutations harvested from his body (Cronenberg would pick that idea up again fifty-two years later; Fifty-two years!). A deadpan scene where a couple grown men lustily rubbing huge metal orbs. Way to sublimate your sex urge, guys. Some amazing early seventies fashion. Plus, those few final scenes... holy shit.

 It's got a good atmosphere going on; The soundtrack isn't entirely successful, but combined with the weirdness of the events depicted and Cronenberg's clinical filmmaking (already fully developed at the point he made this), it all adds up to an effectively unnerving picture. 

 The film prefigures many of the filmmaker's interests - hell, it prefigures his son's interests, with a throwaway idea that would inform all of Antiviral. It's a worthwhile, rewarding slog.