Much has been made of the fact that writer/director David Cronenberg’s latest film,The Shrouds, is inspired by the death of his wife of 38 years, Carolyn, who succumbed to cancer in 2017. This personal tragedy has resulted in a movie that is, in a way which is more effective upon reflection than while actually watching it, all about grief. Specifically, it’s about the grieving process, which everyone experiences differently. But Cronenberg taps into some universal notions about it; the grieving process is messy, illogical, coldly unsympathetic, and filled with questions that will never be answered. As it turns out, so isThe Shrouds.
Its low-energy and cumbersome story spirals out in odd, conspiratorial directions that make sense intellectually, since the death of a loved one often has us reaching for explanations that are ridiculous on their face but justified given our mind’s natural inclination to assign meaning to events. But these fragments of often morbidly humorous ideas don’t coalesce into a statement worthy ofwhat we’ve come to expect from Cronenberg, other than to argue that grief is a shape-shifting and never-ending thing. And even though that is by design, it still makes the film awfully tough to engage with on anything other than an auteurist level.
The Shroudsplays exactly like the film we imagine the 82-year-old master would make about this topic. It’s a painfully personal mixtape of his long-held technological and biological obsessions and is emotionally accessible only to those on his darkly comic, opaque, and often icky wavelength.
Vincent Cassel Plays David Cronenberg… Kind Of
The Shrouds
Described as Cronenberg’s “most personal film”, Cassel plays Karsh, a grieving widower, who builds an innovative device to help people connect with the dead.
If there was any further doubt about the depths of Cronenberg’s connection to the material, then it will be dispelled upon the sight oftop-billed Vincent Cassel(a Cronenberg veteran fromEastern PromisesandA Dangerous Method). With his thin face, silver hair, and darkly chic vestments, Cassel suggests that the film’s main character is Cronenberg himself. But really, Cassel plays Karsh, a producer of industrial videos whose wife Rebecca (an excellent Diane Kruger) died of cancer four years prior.
In response, Karsh developed a high-tech, camera-covered shroud that’s placed over a deceased person’s body before burial, allowing mourners to view their dead loved ones at the gravesite or on a cellphone app as they decompose. GraveTech, as it’s called, is so popular that there are plans for it to go global.
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Karsh justifies his invention by saying that being “in the grave with [Rebecca] makes me happy,” because her body still exists in a very real, if decaying, form for him to view with the press of a button. There is a certain sorrowful logic to that, but failing to let go of your loved one means your grief never ends. It also means that Karsh will sink deeper into conspiracy theories to help him explain an event as tragically random as Rebecca’s passing.
That process begins when the GraveTech graveyard is vandalized by unseen hammer-wielding assailants who could be connected to the Chinese, the Russians, or eco-terrorists. This introduces a bit of mystery to the proceedings and, even if it’s a mystery not meant to be solved, it still feels like a story thread that functions more as subtext than text. And this is a film so buried in subtext that the actual text becomes blurred beyond perception and never comes alive.
The Shroudssees Cronenberg — whose influence remains undeniable, as in recentfilms likeThe Substance— working out his personal issues and filtering the effort through ideas we’ve seen in his previous films. There’s a bit of 1988’sDead Ringershere in the form of Rebecca’s twin sister, Terry (also Kruger), a veterinarian turned dog groomer who is sexually aroused by conspiracy theories. Karsh has maintained a supportive friendship with his ex-sister-in-law, although, given that Rebecca’s body can only be seen and not touched, her twin sister is best equipped to perversely address Karsh’s sexual needs. In a nod toCronenberg’s controversial 1996 dramaCrash, Rebecca appears in disturbing dream sequences, covered in scars and sutures as her cancer-ravaged body renders her bones so brittle she can scarcely be hugged.
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If Terry stands in for Rebecca as a sexual being, her intellectual being is represented by Hunny, an AI assistant who looks and sounds like Karsh’s dead wife (Kruger even supplies the voice) and can change virtual shape to cheer him up. The idea of Karsh cobbling together a simulacrum of his dead wife in the vein ofVertigousing tech and genetically similar flesh sounds reasonable enough as drama, but it doesn’t play that way.
Ideas come and go as the film remains a slog and Cronenberg heaps on the dead ends. These include the terminally ill Hungarian with a blind wife (Sandrine Holt), and Terry’s sweaty, paranoid ex-husband, Maury (Guy Pearce giving the film’s only traditionally entertaining performance), who helps Karsh investigate the vandalism at the graveyard. It doesn’t end there as Cronenberg has us momentarily wondering about the odd growths coming from Rebecca’s decaying bones, the notion that GraveTech could be the opening salvo in a global surveillance system and, why not, the idea that Rebecca’s doctor was also her former professor and her former lover.
‘The Shrouds’ Is a Disappointment But It’ll Stay With You
The behind-the-scenes contributions also add to the film’s distancing effect, from Christopher Donaldson’s measured editing to Douglas Koch’s murky cinematography. Then there’s Paris-born Cassel, whose accented English is a poor fit for Cronenberg’s flat, often overly expository dialogue.
Still, it’s possible thatThe Shroudswill stay with you after it’s over, as the disappointment one feels after its ambiguously unambiguous ending is replaced by the slow recognition of why Cronenberg told this story in this way. Cronenberg has, in effect, given us the gift of watching him use his considerable talents to overcome his unimaginable grief. If only the gift wasn’t wrapped in so many dense shrouds.
The Shrouds, a co-production of Prospero Pictures, SBS International, and Saint Productions and distributed by Sideshow and Janus Films, opens in New York and Los Angeles on April 18 and nationwide on April 25.
