When it was announced that Kristen Stewart had joined the cast of David Cronenberg’s then-upcoming Crimes of the Future, it made almost too much sense. Cronenberg’s dialogue is often clinical, precise, and not quite natural, especially in his body horror movies; characters describe themselves as living in “a highly excited state of overstimulation,” and discuss how car crashes are “fertilizing rather than destructive events.” Stewart is a natural fit for that kind of dialogue: her acting style is equal parts naturalistic and unsettling, with mumblecore-esque line readings and a twitchy, withdrawn physicality. Those who are used to more showy displays might have trouble adjusting to her wavelength, but she’s a fiercely intelligent performer - and perfectly suited to the weird world of Cronenberg. One could imagine her playing Jeff Goldblum’s role in a gender-flipped remake of The Fly, but until that day comes, we have her performance in Crimes of the Future. And goodness gracious, what a performance it is.

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A bit of context: Crimes of the Future takes place in a non-specific future ravaged by pollution and decay, where most humans have evolved past feeling pain, and some end up growing new organs. The government, wanting to clamp down on “accelerated evolution syndrome,” creates a registry for cataloging new organs, and has a couple of bureaucrats investigate a performance art duo, Saul Tenser and Caprice (Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux), whose act revolves around surgically removing these new organs in front of an audience. Stewart plays Timlin, one of the two bureaucrats, a nervous young woman who becomes fascinated (and eventually even aroused) by Tenser’s grotesque art. Given the strangeness of Crimes’ setting, as well as its surreal, darkly comic, and remarkably horny tone, it’s no surprise that Stewart turns in a weird performance. But even with all that context, it’s hard to overstate just how fascinatingly strange Stewart is in this movie.

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Image via NEON

As Timlin, Stewart is a skittish little creep. She has the body language of someone being held at gunpoint, and so many nervous tics that it’s like she’s trying to vibrate out of her own skin. All of her lines are delivered in a breathless whisper, overly enunciated to emphasize the invasive, ASMR-esque quality of her voice - the wet clicks and pops of her “t” and “p” sounds, the tense hiss of her “s” sounds. (“It has meaning. Very potent meaning. And…many, many people respond to it," Timlin awkwardly states after becoming a fan of Sal and Caprice's live show.) For most of her screen time, she appears to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, an orgasm, or both at once. Certain animals come to mind, mostly the kind of animals that come out at night and eat garbage: mice, ferrets, weasels, possums. Tenser finds her “attractive in a bureaucratic way,” but Caprice is just disturbed.

Timlin, and Stewart’s performance as her, is similarly polarizing for the audience. Some critics have lauded Stewart as a scene-stealing revelation, while others merely find her irritating and creepy. On one level, this is fair enough; Timlin was written to be irritating and creepy, after all, and Stewart cranks it all up to eleven in a way that can be genuinely uncomfortable. But that discomfort doesn’t just come from the tics, the unnerving whispers, the phrase “surgery is the new sex,” or even that part where she sticks her finger in Tenser’s mouth. The discomfort also comes from unfamiliarity, from the fact that Stewart is playing an archetype that women very rarely get to play: a clammy, horny little rodent.

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Image via Neon

There have been plenty of sexually repressed women in cinema, but there’s a degree of beauty and glamour to them that one doesn’t often see in sexually repressed men. Take Belle de Jour, whose main character, Séverine (Catherine Deneuve), is essentially a porn archetype given depth: the prim housewife who longs to be humiliated and dominated in bed. Carrie turned the squat, plump, pimply outcast of Stephen King’s original novel into a tall, thin, blemish-free young woman played by Sissy Spacek who just happens to be shy. Even Michael Haneke, despite his best efforts, couldn’t suck all the eroticism out of The Piano Teacher, whose stern, ruthless Erika (Isabelle Huppert) sometimes comes across as a dominatrix without the leather. None of these examples are bad, necessarily, but they throw Stewart’s performance in Crimes of the Future into sharper relief.

As Timlin, Stewart isn’t much like Catherine Deneuve, Sissy Spacek, or Isabelle Huppert. Instead, she’s reminiscent of some of the Creep Pantheon’s finest male members. There’s a bit of Peter Lorre in her shifty, darting eyes, which could be looking for predators or prey. There's a bit of Willem Dafoe in her invasive physicality, such as her obvious hunger as she sizes Tenser up in her office. There's a lot of Paul Dano in her neediness, which is pathetic and skin-crawling in equal measure - even her boldest moments, like “surgery is the new sex” and the aforementioned finger business, feel like they were preceded by several bathroom mirror pep talks. The idea of a shy girl who’s secretly a freak is a popular trope, but Stewart doesn’t play Timlin as a derivative fantasy; instead, she’s a maladjusted little weirdo, too nervous to indulge comfortably in her desires but too desperate to stop herself.

All this talk about Timlin’s creepiness might give the impression that she’s a one-note caricature, a slimy pervert in a stained raincoat pleasuring herself to colonoscopy footage (or whatever people watch for porn in David Cronenberg movies.) But what’s truly impressive about Stewart’s performance is that, although she’s clearly enjoying herself with all the tics and affectations, she never loses sight of the character. Timlin is creepy, to be sure, but although she does something shady at the end of the film she’s not exactly evil. She’s just motivated by the same basic needs as everyone else: love, lust, and the desire to find something meaningful in her buttoned-up, bureaucratic life. It’s a fun, clever, fascinating performance, proving once and for all that women can be pathetic little weasels, too - and isn’t that progress, at the end of the day?