A trio of clips from David Cronenberg’s upcoming Crimes of the Future has surfaced online, giving us our first look at the director’s return to the body horror genre out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
The film stars Viggo Mortensen, Kristen Steward, and Léa Seydoux, and takes the director back into the world of sci-fi after making a number of films in recent years that can more firmly be placed in the realm of grounded thrillers, such as A History of Violence and Cosmopolis.
The clips were uploaded to the YouTube channel for The Playlist and come directly from the Cannes Film Festival’s press site, according to the video descriptions.
Cronenberg is perhaps best known for his fascination with horror centered around the human body, and often utilizing eye-popping special effects in 1980s cinema, with movies such as The Fly, Videodrome, and Dead Ringers.
In the initial trailer for the film, released last month, we got a glimpse at what appeared to be a highly-sexualized vision of the future, with notable influence from Alien creature designer H.R. Giger. In the 1990s, Cronenberg made another unusual exploration of sexuality with the James Spader-starring film Crash, a cinematic effort that compared people getting into car crashes as a metaphor for sex.
In this new film, it takes place in a future where humankind is exploring ways to adjust their biology and physiology with a whim, in what is known as “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome.”
One of the clips even shows Mortensen’s character laying down in some kind of alien-looking pod, as onlookers document the process using strangely retro cameras, including what looks like a Super 8 film camera. In the tradition of Videodrome, the scene is also peppered with now-obsolete cathode-ray tube television sets.
Crimes of the Future is slated for a U.S. release in June.