David Cronenberg​'s 'Crimes of the Future' Teaser Previews Performance Art Horror

David Cronenberg returns to the horror genre with Crimes of the Future, coming to theaters in June, and you can get a sneak peek in a new teaser, below.

"It is time to stop seeing. It is time to stop speaking. It is time to listen," the narration on the teaser ominously repeats.

Crimes of the Future, which stars Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Scott Speedman, Welket Bungué, Don McKellar, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Tanaya Beatty, Nadia Litz, Lihi Kornowski, and Denise Capezza, is set in a not-so-distant future when humankind has to learn to live in synthetic surroundings.

While humanity's biology has changed, many people have also adapted to this new way of life through "accelerated evolution syndrome" and special equipment that helps them with everything from eating to sleeping. Saul Tenser (Mortensen), a beloved performance artist in this world uses a particular machine that helps detect the growth of new organs, and this discovery has been turned into a voyeuristic surgical show.

Of course, this not widely accepted, and soon enough, a secret government entity (named the National Organ Registry) is instilled to discreetly track new organ growths, paying very close attention to Saul's avant-garde anomalies.

The film, Cronenberg said in a statement, "is a meditation on human evolution. Specifically the ways in which we have had to take control of the process because we have created such powerful environments that did not exist previously."

"Crimes of the Future is an evolution of things I have done before. Fans will see key references to other scenes and moments from my other films. That's a continuity of my understanding of technology as connected to the human body. Technology is always an extension of the human body, even when it seems to be very mechanical and non-human. A fist becomes enhanced by a club or a stone that you throw — but ultimately, that club or stone is an extension of some potency that the human body already has. At this critical junction in human history, one wonders — can the human body evolve to solve problems we have created? Can the human body evolve a process to digest plastics and artificial materials not only as part of a solution to the climate crisis, but also, to grow, thrive, and survive?" he continued.

The film is produced by Robert Lantos and executive produced by Joe Iacono, Aida Tannyan, Peter Touche, Christelle Conan, Tom Quinn, Jeff Deutchman, Christian Parkes, and Thorsten Schumacher. It is distributed by NEON.