In a not-so-distant future, humankind is learning to adapt to its synthetic surroundings. Beloved performance artist Saul Tenser sleeps in a womb-like bed suspended in mid-air. This machine detects the growth of new organs in Saul’s body. Saul and his creative partner, Caprice, have turned the discovery and removal of new body organs into performance art. These human evolutionary changes are not met with universal approval. A new secret government entity is established to discreetly track new organ growths, with particular enthusiasm for Saul’s artistic anomalies. With increased scrutiny on his art, Saul is forced to consider what would be his most shocking performance of all.
“The human condition is the human body. (...) As it evolves, it is changing, it’s changing in very subtle ways and then some not so subtle ways. Partly it’s because of what we’re doing to the planet, partly it’s what we’re doing to ourselves with our own technology. I thought I’d like to make a movie that has to do with how society would react to changes in the human body that it thought were dangerous, and should be suppressed. I thought that was an interesting topic for me to explore in the movie, Crimes of the Future." (David Cronenberg)