107 min | R | June 3, 2022 | Neon
In a future where humans no longer feel pain, a performance artist grows new organs and his partner cuts them out in front of an audience. Saul Tenser is the canvas and the gallery at once. Cronenberg returns to the operating table, and the knife has not dulled.
Saul Tenser lives in a world where the human body has stopped feeling pain and started inventing new organs. He grows them inside himself and his partner Caprice removes them in live surgical performances staged as art. A government bureau registers these new organs the way a clerk registers a deed. David Cronenberg builds the film around a single question. When the body itself becomes the frontier of art and politics, who controls the right to change?
Viggo Mortensen plays Saul Tenser hunched and rasping, a man who treats his own evolution as both gift and disease. He speaks in a strangled whisper and eats in a chair that writhes to ease his digestion. Léa Seydoux plays Caprice as the surgeon and the lover, and she handles the scalpel with an intimacy that makes the operations feel like sex. Kristen Stewart plays Timlin, a registry bureaucrat aroused by the new flesh, and she delivers her come-on line about surgery being the new sex in a breathless stammer that steals the scene. Scott Speedman plays Lang Dotrice, a father pushing a radical agenda through his dead son’s altered body.
Cronenberg writes and directs with the calm of a man who invented this genre and feels no need to rush. The production design renders the future as decay rather than gleam. The surgical pods and beds look like exhumed insects, organic and rotting and built by the late artist Carol Spier’s vision of bone and chitin. Howard Shore’s score drones underneath the operations like an organ in an empty cathedral. The cinematography keeps the rooms dim and the skin lit, so every incision reads as the only bright thing in the frame.
This is Cronenberg revisiting his own obsessions with a steadier hand and a colder eye. The ideas about evolution, surveillance, and desire are familiar from his earlier work, and the film knows it. It moves slowly and trusts the viewer to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it. The result is a meditation that values atmosphere over momentum, and it lands its central provocation without ever raising its voice.