I don’t know how David Cronenberg lost me so completely. I used to be an admirer back in the old days of Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), The Dead Zone (1983), The Fly (1986), Videodrome (1983) — especially Videodrome. But somewhere between the time of Naked Lunch (1991) and eXistenZ (1999), his visceral impact — for me, at least — started waning fast, even as he went deeper into images and set pieces revolving around gore-and-technology, a subgenre his fans call “body horror.” And now, decades later, here we are at Crimes of the Future — perhaps the ultimate “body horror” film — and it’s a complete bore.

I didn’t even find the film particularly gross or disgusting — oozing fleshy computers and sentient insectoid beds and metallic prods poking around exposed human organs are now just another day at the office when it comes to Cronenberg. The reports of people walking out, presumably sickened, at the Cannes Film Festival, where the film got a six-minute standing ovation — that’s one more minute than the ovation for Top Gun: Maverick  — just go to show that Cannes audiences are, overall, pretty silly, and probably drunk.

Crimes of the Future is set in a dystopian future in which the decimated population leaves only people who are mutating and losing their capacity to feel pain, which makes “desktop surgery” a common practice. Infection is becoming a thing of the past, resulting in a drop in basic sanitation so that grubby surfaces are everywhere. A pair of performance artists named Saul Tensor and Caprice (Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux) are celebrities showcasing the growth of life-threatening new organs in Saul’s body, by staging their surgical removal. Their show brings them to the attention of the National Organ Registry, which is charting the disease Saul suffers from, “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome.” The registry is run by a bureaucrat named Wippet (Don McKellar) and his timid assistant Timlin (Kristen Stewart), who becomes sexually fascinated by Saul, noting that “surgery is the new sex.”