Crimes of the Future: there are moments in David Cronenberg’s film which are visually very disturbing, but they never feel gratuitous. Instead, they are part of the world-building, in a dystopian near-future where the human body has suffered many modifications and pain is non-existing, for the most part. The world is decrepit, and it’s not hard to imagine how things got that way. The story gets a bit murky: there are a lot of ideas about what humanity means in such a world and the allegiances of the characters to those ideas, crucial as they may be to the plot, aren’t obvious. Performances are, in general, low-key, somewhat off-putting considering all that is happening on-screen. Viggo Mortensen is frail as the man who most clearly showcases the new reality, and he has good chemistry with Léa Seydoux, as his partner in the art installations and in life. Kristen Stewart is weird and mousy as a government official. A good deal of what makes the film so creepy comes from the work of the production designers, Islam Gamal and Carol Spier; cinematographer Douglas Koch enhances it with his framing. Composer Howard Shore contributes with his musical score to the uneasiness.