The theme of “Crimes of the Future,” with Viggo Mortensen, is making art in a destroyed cultural environment and debauched cultural consumption. Photograph by Neon / Everett

The murder of a young boy by his mother serves as the catalyst for David Cronenberg’s new film, “Crimes of the Future,” which is set in an imagined future when humans are ruled by psychosurgery. The film’s location and action are as stylized and abstracted as those of ancient tragedy, and “Crimes of the Future” was filmed in Greece. The death, though, does not provide the drama with its tragic power; rather, it is used as a symbol or indicator of it—a minor narrative element with little emotional impact. “Crimes of the Future” is, in one sense, a conceptual film; it’s more about ideas than people or incidents, and less a drama about characters’ lives than an allegory for Cronenberg’s darkly diagnostic perspective on contemporary criminality, which society commits against itself.

“Crimes of the Future” is a thinly developed dystopian fantasy with characters that are devoid of psychology and context, with no awareness of the social order around them or the history that brought them there; it just shows concepts without providing answers. In this context, it’s a typical “late film” in that it is the first feature Cronenberg has directed since 2014, and what he has to say here he puts on the line with few of the blandishments of popular films or the aesthetic attention of art-house ones. It’s more of a viewing experience than a viewing event. The concepts that Cronenberg explores are strong and affecting; his topic is the struggle to create art in an eroded cultural environment rife with consumerism. It’s the story of eight years of silence, an apocalyptic vision of the end of the road, and the death of everything he’d known.

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