When news spread, in early 2021, that David Cronenberg was preparing a film called Crimes of the Future, it brought attention to a relatively obscure featurette with the same title that he shot in 1970. Cronenberg was quick to point out that he wasn’t remaking his rarely seen early work. Indeed, the film that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival a year later had little in common with its predecessor in terms of plot or form. It did, however, share several ideas – not just with its namesake, but with all of Cronenberg’s films that explore the human body’s vast potential for horror and ecstasy.

Almost like a greatest hits album, the new Crimes comprises a catalogue of Cronenbergian tropes: Viggo Mortensen’s zippered abdomen recalls James Woods’ stomach VCR from Videodrome (1983), the facetious conceit of an “inner beauty contest” is borrowed from Dead Ringers (1988), technology and sex interlink in ways reminiscent of both Crash (1996) and eXistenZ (1999), and so on… What’s most remarkable about watching the original Crimes now is realising how many theoretical preoccupations that have guided and defined Cronenberg’s oeuvre already existed in embryonic form at the very beginning. It’s as if, after first laying them out, he had spent years experimenting with different combinations, letting them grow and evolve in individual films until, after five decades, he compiled the results and assessed his work’s relevance in light of the present.

This notion of the director as scientist makes sense when we consider that Cronenberg didn’t come to filmmaking via the habitual routes – he didn’t have an epiphanic cinema experience at an impressionable age, he wasn’t gifted an 8mm camera by his parents as a child, he didn’t study film at university (the discipline didn’t even exist in Canada at the time). Growing up, his passions were science and literature. Accordingly, he first enrolled in a science degree, found it too dry and switched to English, then started making films on the side after discovering those of other students. Following two shorts, Transfer (1966) and From the Drain (1967), which he now disparages (“artistically they’re so bad… everything was wrong”), he made a pair of underground features: Stereo (1969) and Crimes. Companion pieces, they are both shot on 35mm, have a running time of just over an hour, and employ very similar formal strategies. While Stereo focuses on a group of telepaths, Crimes envisions a future society afflicted by physical mutations. Together, they represent the Cartesian dualism of mind and body that has fascinated Cronenberg’s cinema ever since.

Crimes was the last time Cronenberg worked in an experimental mode before turning to commercial filmmaking. He cast his friends and directed, wrote, produced, shot and edited the film himself. That the audio is post-synced was perhaps motivated by the wish to remain a one-man crew, since it’s virtually impossible to operate a camera and record decent sound at the same time. The story is narrated in voice-over by the protagonist, Adrian Tripod, and the soundtrack otherwise alternates between stretches of silence and recordings of animal and aquatic sounds. One has the feeling of watching the characters from behind glass, like specimens presented for study. Though the verbose and comically florid voice-over still betrays Cronenberg’s literary roots, it also contains myriad elements that he would elaborate cinematically in the years to come, eventually inspiring the term “Cronenbergian”.

That this term should be evoked by a film as aesthetically and philosophically different as Isadora Neves Marques’ Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (2022) testifies to the prominence of Cronenberg’s vision. The disturbing opening image of a bag of bloody meat and the ensuing revelation that it’s lab-made and therefore (arguably) vegan is a joke that would be right at home in a Cronenberg film. Likewise the idea of transplanting ovaries into a cis man, who then produces eggs to be used for IVF, thus coming a step closer to realising the prospect of a male pregnancy. In fact, the latter proposition brings the film in direct dialogue with the original Crimes, in which the female-less society is at risk of extinction.

A certain biological determinism informs Cronenberg’s cinema and has earned him the label of reactionary from some queer and feminist critics. Others, conversely, read his films as potent metaphors about the oppression of sexual and gender difference. Regardless of interpretation, his conception of bodies and identities habitually includes society only as a force intent on maintaining the status quo, not complicit in its formulation. Marques’ characters, on the other hand, regard their predicaments as resulting from factors that are biological as well as social. In order to survive, Adrian Tripod proclaims the need to “evolve a novel sexuality for a new species of man.” Becoming Male’s Mirene suggests a different path: “We can create our own artificiality.”