David Cronenberg will invariably Cronenberg — and at this stage of his career, with 47 years of feature films to his credit, he has earned the right to Cronenberg all over himself and his audience. This director was all about “body horror” decades before that was even a thing, so why shouldn’t he use one whole movie to let himself go and make the most disgusting picture he can imagine?

That doesn’t mean we have to watch it, though.

Still, to his credit, Cronenberg does really mean it. In his new film, “Crimes of the Future,” he’s not imitating someone else, and he’s not trying to be shocking for the sake of it. This is stuff that is actually in his head. That doesn’t make “Crimes” any better, but it does save it from becoming annoying. His film feels authentic and sincere, even as it’s also slow, dull, repetitive, obsessive and absolutely revolting.

It takes place in the future, and one thing we know about the future: It’s always lousy. In this not-too-far-off time, human beings have lost their ability to experience pain, and infections have ceased to exist. That combination has led to the latest fad, known as desktop surgery, with people operating on themselves for entertainment purposes.

This has also led to an increase in performance artists — nowthat’sscary — and chief among these is Saul (Viggo Mortensen), who is renowned for growing new nonfunctioning organs, such as an extra endocrine gland. His form of performance is to lie there while his partner, Caprice (Lea Seydoux), cuts the organs out of him with an automated scalpel. For this, he is considered the Picasso of his time.

Apparently, in this future world, everybody shares Cronenberg’s predilection for blood and viscera. We meet other artists, such as a woman who intricately slices both sides of her face, the sight of which inspires erotic agitation in Caprice. Kristen Stewart, doing some fun character work as a nerdy bureaucrat, tells Saul that “surgery is the new sex.” This is something he already seems to know, as his and Caprice’s lovemaking consists of lying together while a machine slices and pokes holes in their torsos.

I wonder whether this sounds more interesting than it is in the experience. “Crimes of the Future” is certainly odd, and therefore fun to talk about, but as a piece of dramatic art it runs into problems right away.

As writer and director, Cronenberg devises for himself a compelling situation, but a situation is not the same as a story. Within 20 minutes, Cronenberg has written himself into a hole, one populated entirely by passive characters who do nothing but get cut up or watch other people get cut up.

Occasionally, the film flickers to life simply by virtue of the particular dynamics of a scene. Don McKellar has several smart comic moments as an ardent fan hoping to enlist Saul in one of his projects. But in such scenes, the energy is coming from the actors, not the script, and as soon as the scene ends, the souffle collapses once again. Mainly, the film is just a lot of blood and many closeups of intestines (most often the small intestine, for those keeping score).

There’s a scene that best captures the film’s peculiar nature: Saul comes home from a long day of having his stomach sliced open and a zipper being installed that joins two sides of his abdomen. Caprice is so turned on by this that she gets on her knees, unzips him and starts licking his internal organs.

我看过很多电影,这是第一次。五月there never be a second.

K“Crimes of the Future”:Horror. Starring Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux and Kristen Stewart. Directed by David Cronenberg. (R. 107 minutes.) In theaters starting Friday, June 3.