Luca Guadagnino's Best Movie of 2022 is Criminally Underrated

Indeed, Luca has only the highest praise for Cronenberg's work: "Greatest movie this year. Fantastic."

He then added: "Another tender movie! It's beautiful to see Cronenberg, who has been constantly seen as a very in control filmmaker with a very clinical coldness to his art, which is true, being so warm and so tender. It's a beautiful love story and it's also a very devastating vision of the future. It's amazing."

He's not alone in this opinion. At least among filmmakers and critics. Crimes of the Future, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, received a six-minute standing ovation and was in competition for the Palme d'Or.

But Crimes of the Future is also another example of a film that was well received by the critics and largely ignored by the public. It didn't even make 1/5 of its $27 million budget at the box office.

Sure, Crimes of the Future is full of gruesome imagery and body horror, but David Cronenberg has never been known for making happy, light-hearted films.

And this is not his first foray into the realm of outright body horror. After all, he directed The Fly. That has not prevented him from being successful with the general public before. But Crimes of the Future is certainly not one of them.

Perhaps the combination of body horror and the oppressive atmosphere of a dystopian future where humanity has largely lost the ability to feel pain, surgery has replaced sex and our race is on its way to becoming something not unlike the Cenobites from Hellraiser, was too much for audiences.

Perhaps they failed to see the warmth and tenderness that Guadagnino was talking about behind all the extreme body modifications. Perhaps Cronenberg has become too accustomed to making films for himself and the critics rather than for the public - after all, it has been over a decade since any of his films have even made their budget back.

Or perhaps Cronenberg's reputation resulted in a genuinely good film being underrated.