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. 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 one of them.

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

 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, with no dialog whatsoever and a stop-start soundtrack consisting of glitchy, atonal synth sounds, gurgling water, moaning people or, distressingly often, complete silence, and featuring an opaque script, the movie is about as hard to follow as this sentence.

 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, and if that information is in the movie, I 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 the director's work): Running a skin clinic, traficking 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.

 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 consisting of 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 back then) it's 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 will inform all of Antiviral. It's a worthwhile, rewarding slog.