In the future, millions of women have died from Rouge’s Malady: a disease caused by cosmetics discovered by mad dermatologist Antoine Rouge, who has disappeared. As Adrian Tripod searches for his missing mentor, he meets an old colleague whose body produces strange, functionless new organs.

Creeping around a concrete, modernist wasteland that has been sapped of sexually mature women, an esoteric foot fetishist and other deviants come under the microscope in one of David Cronenberg’s earliest experiments. Same enigmatic title, different perversions: other crimes of the future exist.