Vigg Mortensen and Lea Seydoux in Crimes of the Future (Neon)

Director David Cronenberg began the buzz for his new movie, Crimes of the Future, shortly before its Cannes Film Festival premiere when he predicted to Deadline that there would be walkouts within its first minutes. At its debut screening, reporters covering Cannes counted the number of those leaving. But don’t believe the hype, and don’t expect graphic shocks or too disturbing imagery (though that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for a Cronenberg film). Though gory, the blood and guts depicted are not realistic enough to be taken too seriously. If audiences do flee to the exits, it is most likely for the airless, glum atmosphere and the murky, metaphorical screenplay.

The script has been kicking around since the late 1990s, and it has a slightly dated quality. It’s set in a dystopian future, in which physical pain has been eliminated. However, because of a hormonal imbalance, the body of performance artist Saul Tenser (the director’s go-to leading man, Viggo Mortensen) has been failing, and he has become a devoted client of LifeFormWave. His discomfort vanishes by reclining in the company’s pod-like OrchidBed, which searches for and relives his pain.

Before a discerning, au courant audience, Saul’s partner (onstage and off-), Caprice (Léa Seydoux), performs a live vivisection on the gaunt Saul, exposing his guts, removing tumors, and replacing them with new organs, some of which are so novel that their functions are not yet known. For the act’s finale, the new body parts are tattooed by Caprice, a former trauma surgeon. Saul is her canvas—he’s described as “an artist of the inner landscape.” However, for motivations that remain fuzzy, Saul surreptitiously joins forces with the New Vice Unit to track a new and illegal evolutionary form of sustaining life that would compete and contradict LifeFormWave’s products. (Spoiler alert: Remember, the advice given to The Graduate’s Benjamin back in 1967? The future lies in plastics.)

Most of the action appears to occur in underground lairs in a decrepit city devoid of sunlight. Very little color penetrates through the saturated dark interiors: The tone is elegantly gloomy. Yet for the most part, the acting is as artificial as Saul’s body parts. Nearly the entire ensemble, directed with a tight grip, features stylized performances with little spontaneity. Kristen Stewart as Timlin, who works for the National Organ Registry that overseas new scientific developments, speaks in breathy, rushed tones. Timlin mainly serves as filler of exposition, summing up one of the film’s concepts, that “Surgery is the new sex.” Mortensen, guttural vocally, struggles to communicate, as though speaking is yet another physical obstacle for Saul. Meanwhile, Seydoux slinks about, leaning against walls, observing, often with a bemused grin.

Like the cast, the script has been reined in; it doesn’t go far enough with its mad scientist-playing-God/oh-no-what-have-we-done scenario. The plot hints at a provocation tying sex with pain, but that idea turns flaccid as the story line stately moves on. Even the mounting of an Inner Beauty Pageant fizzles. Instead, Cronenberg relies on the death and dismemberment of a boy as a dare. For some viewers, that will be enough to look/walk away. For others, it may come across as a desperate, ho-hum reach to provoke. If there is a sense of impending danger, it’s thanks to Howard Shore’s majestic score, dominated by the ominous, solemn intoning of blasting brass instruments.