Crimes of the Future

I have been looking forward to Crimes of the Future ever since it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and I finally had the chance to see it last night.  It is incredibly bizarre and definitely won't be for everyone but I found it to be haunting and extremely thought-provoking.  In the near future, humanity has begun evolving to cope with a rapidly decaying environment but the government attempts to control the rate of evolution with a National Organ Registry and a police force dedicated to solving evolutionary crimes called the New Vice Unit.  Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) has developed the ability to grow new organs inside of his body but this is incredibly painful and causes severe digestive issues which require specialized machines to regulate.  He and his partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux) have turned the surgery required to remove his extra organs into performance art in front of a live audience who view mutilation as a form of pleasure.  This attracts the attention of a bureaucrat (Kristen Stewart) with the National Organ Registry who becomes enamored with him, a police detective (Welket Bungue) with the New Vice Unit who asks him to infiltrate a group of underground evolutionists, and the leader (Scott Speedman) of this group who wants to use his notoriety to publicly highlight an illegal but revolutionary advance.  I found the narrative to be a bit confusing in the beginning because the audience is dropped in the middle of a strange new world but there was a moment when everything suddenly came together for me and, by the time it ended, I was left wanting more because the themes are so compelling (the most fascinating, in my opinion, being that the destruction of the planet is actually changing our bodies).  The mood is quite unsettling (but it is not nearly as graphic as I was expecting) with a bleak production design filled with abandoned and rotting vehicles, atmospheric lighting, and a tension-filled score.  All of the performances are great but Stewart is brilliant and steals every scene she is in as a woman desperate for sensation in a world devoid of feeling.  I was captivated by this movie and I have not been able to stop thinking about it but it is not something I would recommend to everyone.