Now in his eighties, Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg has gotten understandably reflective, his films having a self-referential quality that wasn’t quite apparent in Videodrome or Scanners. In The Shrouds, he takes his leading man, veteran French actor Vincent Cassel, and styles him like a Cronenberg clone; gangly but debonair, with a striking, voluminous head of silver hair. Does this suggest autobiography? I wouldn’t go that far. Cassel plays Karsh, a tech entrepreneur who’s managed a way to monetize body burial in a new, fascinating way. Karsh’s day-to-day life is managed by an AI assistant named Hunny, and he rather conspicuously drives his Tesla, often utilizing the self-driving mechanism. Is this how Cronenberg views himself? As a capitalistic man fully embedded in the sinister technology of the modern day?
The answer is yes and no. One thing that Karsh definitely shares with the Shrouds director is an obsession with the human body. Cronenberg is often cited as the king of the “body horror” genre, but while most films within that niche category simply seek to titillate with the violence they can enact on a body, Cronenberg’s interest is in the body itself – and yes, violence (and sex) often plays a part in that. This has been the case since the beginning, from Rabid to Crimes of the Future. The context of his obsession may evolve, but the fact of it stays the same. In The Shrouds, Cronenberg moves past the living bodies and into dead ones. The shrouds from the title are an invention of Karsh’s, a new mode for people to keep tabs on the decaying bodies of their loved ones. Isn’t that utterly macabre? Not to Karsh, and he has plenty of people willing to invest.
The motivation for this idea occurred to Karsh after the death of his wife, Becca (Diane Krueger). Watching her casket, he became irrationally moved by the urge to climb in and be with her corpse. These new shrouds allow him to do this virtually. An app on your phone allows you to get a 3D interactive view of the body inside the shroud, in all its degenerative glory, and project it on a screen on the tombstone. These new cemeteries that he’s producing all come with screen projecting tombstones that glow beautifully, creating an aesthetic beauty to highlight the technological advancement. The cemeteries are non-denominational. The only requirement for burial in the new shrouds is a willingness to participate in Karsh’s daring experiment – and of course, having the money to pay for it.
Karsh remains close with Becca’s sister Terry (also played by Krueger), who bares a remarkable resemblance to his late wife. Terry’s ex-husband, Maury (Guy Pearce), is a troubled computer software engineer whose erratic emotional behavior has alienated everyone around him. It’s Maury who designed the security for Karsh’s company, GraveTech (just a brilliant name), and it’s also Maury who created Hunny (voiced by – you guessed it – Diane Krueger), who’s become indispensable to Karsh’s day-to-day life. When his cemetery is the victim of a seemingly random act of vandalism, he reaches out to Maury. The attackers seem to have also hacked GraveTech’s system, disallowing any of his clients (including himself) from viewing their loved ones. He asks Maury to get to the bottom of it, and bring GraveTech (ironically) back to life.
It’s Karsh’s intense grief that makes him a much more sympathetic figure than your average tech businessman, and it also leads to him being more vulnerable to tech’s more nefarious intentions. During the day, he obsessively watches Becca’s body, and at night he’s plagued by dreams where she visits him, each visit weakened further by medical procedures that chip away at the body that he loves so much. This obsession – this desperation to see Becca’s body – runs parallel to a dry spell in his sex life, with women failing to live up to the idealized version of his late wife. Maury suspiciously believes that Karsh is interested in Terry, after all, she does look exactly like the love of his life. There’s also Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the blind wife of a Hungarian businessman who may sponsor a GraveTech cemetery in Budapest, who becomes aggressive in her physical pursuit of Karsh.
Because it’s Cronenberg, Karsh’s sex life, and all the hang-ups therein, is a major plot point of the film. Terry proves adventurous, but it’s hard to tell if she’s actually interested in Karsh, or if she has her sight set on hurting Maury, or acting out upon a sibling rivalry. Soo-Min offers something cleaner, even if her marriage to a prospective client is a major complication. Soo-Min’s wealth means that Karsh can also choose to further entrench himself in the comfort of technology, far away from the pain and suffering the regular human life has to offer. All he has to do is look at the sad sack Maury to understand how little appeal there is to life in the real world. This search for sexual satisfaction runs aside the whodunnit of the vandalism, which adds further layers to his grief.
Despite the compounding nature of Cronenberg’s script, he directs the film with a conspicuously low energy. The Shrouds has the same cinematographer (Douglas Koch) and editor (Christopher Donaldson) as his 2022 film Crimes of the Future, and it shows. Both movies exist in an unsettled stasis, a latent surreality hanging over every frame. Crimes was the more immediate, emotional film of the two, a much more interesting portrait of an artist struggling to make heads or tails of his place in the world. I find Viggo Mortensen a much more compelling Cronenberg avatar. Cassel’s Karsh is a cypher, more open to projection than definition. Cassel also struggles with the heightened dialogue, often upstaged by Krueger, Holt, and especially Pearce.
The Shrouds is most effective as a film about grief, the way it effects the body in life and in death. One can struggle throughout to make heads or tails of a point to it all, and too many sequences unfold without any vivacity. Its aged melancholy often makes up for very little actually happening. Its conclusion – and its suggestion of a world where people will dip further into their devices to rid themselves of human emotion – is brilliant, and you’ll wish the movie before it handled itself with the same assurance. In particular scenes (that I won’t spoil), you can see the genius of Cronenberg is still there, but The Shrouds never manages to hold onto that genius very long. Instead it dawdles between a mystery and an erotic drama, without ever really committing to either.
Written and Directed by David Cronenberg