David Cronenberg is “expecting walkouts” during Cannes screening of ‘Crimes Of The Future’

Kristen Stewart has discussed the audience reaction during the premiere screening of David Cronenberg’s Crimes Of The Future.The body horror film premiered during the Cannes Film Festival on Monday (May 23) and reportedly sparked walkouts within the first five minutes due to a number of gory scenes.Speaking to Vulture following the premiere, Stewart, who plays investigator Timlin, believes there’s a “delicacy” to the film that’s been overlooked.“Before the credits lifted, it was dead silent,” Stewart recalled. “I was like, ‘Ooh, people don’t know how to feel. They don’t know if they should clap or not.’ I felt like it was the fuckin’ Will Smith moment where everyone was like, ‘Yes? No? No.

It’s a Cannes Film Festival legend. Supposedly, at the 1999 festival, when David Cronenberg headed the competition jury, he swayed his jury cohorts to award the Palme d’Or to the Dardennes’ “Rosetta” over Pedro Almodóvar‘s festival favorite, “All About My Mother.” Now, at this year’s festival, “Crimes Of The Future” star Viggo Mortensen put the myth to bed, stating that it’s a “bullshit” rumor and that the jury’s choice for “Rosetta” was unanimous.

David Cronenberg’s latest deep dive into body horror, “Crimes Of The Future,” had its world premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this week (read our review here). And it looks like the Canadian auteur’s first film since 2014’s “Maps To The Stars” is another extreme offering.

As women in the United States are seeing their rights to safe abortions, access to reproductive health services, and contraceptives slowly being stripped away by red state governors, a recent leak revealed the conservative majority Supreme Court may strike down Roe vs. Wade, ending legal abortion.

sickened by horrific scenes in “Crimes of the Future” reportedly walked out of the premiere at Cannes Film Festival on Monday.The film — starring Kristen Stewart, Léa Seydoux and Viggo Mortensen — is filled with scenes of child autopsies, bloody intestines, body mutations and people orgasming while licking open wounds.  The majority of the exits reportedly occurred within the first five minutes of the film but a specifically grotesque scene of Seydoux licking an open wound sent others out the door further along in the film. Both Variety and the Daily Mail reported walkouts, but Entertainment Weekly claimed there were none.New York Times journalist Kyle Buchanan tweeted from the theatre that he counted 15 people who walked out of the cinema during the screening due to “notably gross plot developments.” Despite being too much for some, the movie directed by David Cronenberg received a seven-minute standing ovation from the remaining audience members at the end.

Kristen Stewart starts her day with the 2022 Cannes Film Festival photo call for her film Crimes of the Future on Tuesday (May 24) in Cannes, France.

At a press conference for his new film “Crimes of the Future” at the Cannes Film Festival, Canadian director David Cronenberg was asked about the film’s politics and the abortion debate in America.

In David Cronenberg’s latest genre twister, Crimes of the Future, Viggo Mortensen and Lea Seydoux plays partners who are performance artists, engrossed in performing surgery (largely on the former) for public nightclub spectacle. They’re enthralled with the freedom they can take on each other’s bodies. All of this in a governing society that’s not too fond of it.

David Cronenberg has unfinished business with the future, which is tricky, seeing as it already constitutes a significant slice of his past. His new film — titled “Crimes of the Future,” as in committed by rather than during that span of time — finds the master on the other side of his extended sojourn in high-minded literary adaptation, biopic quasi-prestige, and Tinseltown satire, back to playing the body-horror hits on which he made his name.

Just when his fans may have figured that David Cronenberg had called it a career (he’s now 79 and hadn’t made a feature since the misfired Maps to the Stars in 2014), along comes a film that only the Canadian maestro of the perverse could have created.

There’s a lot of weird fetishes in this world, which we won’t go into, but for David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, the new sex is surgery.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticMost filmmakers who want to unsettle you in a horror movie will reach for a familiar set of tools: slashers, demons, shock cuts, soundtracks that go boom! in the night. But in “Crimes of the Future,” the writer-director David Cronenberg is out to provoke and disturb us with something far more traumatic than mere monsters.Am I talking about the fact that in the distant future where the film is set, human beings grow mysterious new organs in their bodies? Or that having those organs removed through surgery has become, for a creepy rebel aesthete named Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), a species of performance art? Or that people no longer experience physical pain, and will therefore stand in the street late at night cutting each other for cheap thrills, as if they were shooting heroin in a back alley? Or that surgery itself, as someone puts it, has become “the new sex”? If you see “Crimes of the Future,” you’ll witness all of these outrages, and a few more besides.

David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future,” characters can feel no pain. Unfortunately, the same wasn’t true for the dozens of attendees at the Cannes premiere of the drama that walked out midway through the film, unable to stomach just exactly what was happening onscreen.The movie also earned a seven-minute standing ovation, suggesting that it could be the most polarizing title to debut at this year’s Cannes.The film reunites Cronenberg with Viggo Mortensen (“A History of Violence,” “Eastern Promises”) and also stars Cannes darlings Kristen Stewart and Lea Seydoux.

“Crimes of the Future” will be David Cronenberg’s final film — never believe a director who says they’re quitting — but it definitely feels like a closing argument, one that both reaffirms the filmmaker’s favorite themes and stylistic choices while also reflecting a shift in his point of view.We’ve been here before with Cronenberg; his 1999 “Existenz” also had the feel of a greatest-hits collection. But for audiences starved for brash choices from one of the cinema’s boldest living provocateurs, even a rehash seems fresher than corporate-assembled, focus-group-approved content.Should this be the Canadian auteur’s final feature, he won’t be leaving on a high note: “Crimes of the Future” won’t be remembered alongside masterpieces like “Dead Ringers,” “The Fly,” “The Brood,” or “Crash.” Nonetheless, as a writer-director, Cronenberg continues to plumb his obsessions, both narrative and visual, and he brings enough energy and bravado to the mix to make this an oft-told story that he’s recounting as though for the first time.Borrowing the title (but little else) from one of his earliest films, “Crimes of the Future” takes place in a near-future dystopia where pain has become a thing of the past and surgery is both a hot trend and the source of a new brand of performance art.

Kristen Stewart keeps it casual while leaving her hotel for an interview appearance in Cannes, France on Monday (May 23).

Kristen Stewart nailed casual chic as she departed the Hôtel Martinez during the 75th annual Cannes Film Festival on Monday.  The actress, 32, flashed the band of her underwear beneath a white Chanel crop top while exhibiting her legs in a pair of distressed denim shorts. Hitting the streets of the French city, she is currently staying at the five-star hotel, where prices per night reach a staggering €1,251 (£1,060).

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentMK2 Films is shooting “Curiosity Room,” a remake of Wim Wenders’s cult 1982 documentary “Room 666,” during the Cannes Film Festival. Produced by MK Prods.

Body horror king David Cronenberg is back with his erotic sci-fi thriller “Crimes of The Future.” The next screens at the Cannes Film Festival soon and NEON releases it domestically on June 8. And while Cronenberg gets a lot of credit for his own work that made it on the big screen, there are a handful of popular sci-fi projects that Cronenberg seemingly had a direct/indirect hand in helping develop–especially their body horror elements.

Nobody does body horror better than David Cronenberg. And in his first movie since 2014’s “Maps To The Stars,” it looks like Cronenberg returns to what he does best: a visceral, extreme take on humanity as we careen into the future.

This month will see the return of beloved genre auteur David Cronenberg (“Crash,” “Naked Lunch”) to the Cannes Film Festival with his anticipated body horror pic “Crimes of The Future,” which boasts an impressive cast that includes Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart. During a lengthy interview with Variety, the Canadian filmmaker talked about the studio offers he passed on during the 1980s that included a story about an unnamed Lucasfilm executive/representative hanging upon him when they reached out to him about directing “Star Wars: Return of The Jedi” after Cronenberg mentioned he only directs his own material.