What Is David Cronenberg's Crimes of the Future About?

What is David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future about? When I meet up with the 79-year-old writer-director

before the Cannes premiere of his latest film, in theaters June 3,

I bring up a few different interpretations.

There’s the surface-level plot, about a near-future society where humans have lost the ability to experience pain

or infection and have started substituting surgery

gazing sensually at the new organs they’ve evolved to spontaneously grow, and turning these mutations into performance art.

Some critics have read the film as an allegory about climate change; others saw it as a laugh

out-loud return to the Cronenbergian body-horror classics of the ’80s; still others felt it was a prescriptive death sentence for the human race.

Cronenberg only shrugs at the idea that he made a movie about himself.