David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future arrives in 2022 with the same title as his earlier film, but the overlap stops there. The new version puts Viggo Mortensen’s Saul Tenser at the center, with Léa Seydoux as Caprice, while the original is described as virtually unrelated.
That split gives the title its charge: one name, two films, and almost no shared story machinery. The 2022 film also shifts the premise from the earlier narration about experimental cosmetics and a special adaptation to a future of new organs and plastic consumption.
Saul Tenser and Caprice
Viggo Mortensen plays Saul Tenser, who wanders around in a hooded jacket coat thing and speaks with a gravelly-throated, whispery hoarse voice. He lives with Caprice, played by Léa Seydoux, and the two move through a cityscape world that the source compares to an adapted graphic novel.
That visual comparison matters because the film does not play like a straightforward revival of Cronenberg’s older idea. It reads as a new construction built around the same title, with the performance and design elements doing the heavy lifting instead of continuity with the earlier plot.
1970 and 2022
Cronenberg made the original Crimes of the Future around 1970, and the source says the new film is virtually unrelated to it. The earlier version’s narration mentions humans undergoing a special adaptation tied to experimental cosmetics, which places it on a different conceptual track from the 2022 story.
By contrast, the 2022 film drops that cosmetics line and imagines people evolving new organs while adapting to dine on plastic. That is not a sequel setup or a remake in any ordinary sense; it is a reuse of title as a kind of creative signal, not a promise of plot continuity.
2005 and A History of Violence
Cronenberg also made A History of Violence in 2005, and it too starred Viggo Mortensen. That recurrence gives Mortensen’s casting in Crimes of the Future a practical industry logic: the director is not just reusing a title, but also returning to a performer who has already carried one of his major later-period films.
The pairing of Mortensen and Seydoux gives the 2022 film a recognizably Cronenberg frame without tying it to the 1970 story. The result is a film that borrows a title, not a blueprint, which leaves the earlier work as a reference point rather than a source map.
For a reader trying to place the two films, the useful answer is simple: the connection is nominal, not narrative. The real comparison is between how Cronenberg used a title in 1970 and how he repurposed it in 2022, with Saul Tenser and Caprice carrying the newer version into its own future.
