David Cronenberg would like to have a few words with you about death.
There have, of course, been an abundance of folks who’ve shuffled off this mortal coil within the Canadian filmmaker’s nearly six decades’ worth of movies, often in the most baroque, grotesque manner possible. (Who could ever forget this? Or this? Or even this?) No one dies in a Grand Guignol-style manner in The Shrouds, Cronenberg’s chilly, chic mix of conspiracy thriller, corporate-espionage drama, and cryptic-in-more-ways-than-one meditation on mourning routines; apologies if that constitutes a spoiler. But this is a film infused with death in every frame, and even when it detours into genre territory and drips drops of acidic humor into its story of a widower who can’t let go, the sense that the end is always present, hovering over and around us, is right there on the surface.
Present, though in the eyes of Karsh (Vincent Cassel), our tour guide of the 21st Century Grief Industrial Complex, not permanent. Not exactly. A creator of industrial videos by trade, this dapper gentleman has a few side hustles as well. For example, the restaurant where Karsh and his blind date (Jennifer Dale) are having lunch? He owns it. And the impeccably kept cemetery in which said restaurant is located? He’s an investor in that as well. In fact, as Karsh explains to his companion, his main interest these days involves GraveTech, an app that connects to a gray, enveloping suit dubbed “the shroud.” Wrap this around someone, and it provides a sort of three-dimensional picture that acts as a sort of perpetual MRI for the entire body. It’s the absolute latest in bleeding-edge burial innovations. “What purpose does it serve exactly?” his date asks. “How dark are you willing to go?” he replies. It’s as much a fourth-wall-breaking wink from Cronenberg to the audience as a response to a fictional character’s curiosity.
The answer, for fans of the legend who gave us Crash, Videodrome, Rabid, and dozens of other envelope-obliterating cinematic touchstones: pretty pitch-fucking-black. So the movie delivers in kind. Several years ago, Karsh’s wife, Becca (Inglourious Basterds‘ Diane Kruger), died from cancer. Her battle with the disease was nasty, brutish, and prolonged. Karsh admitted that, at her funeral, he had “an intense, visceral urge to get into the box” with his soulmate. That was not an option, so he did the next best thing: He designed a “ShroudCam” that, when paired with the app and suit, allows him to peer into his loved one’s grave and observe his spouse as she slowly decays. Once they walk to Becca’s grave, Karsh hits a touchscreen on her tombstone and up pops the slowly rotating picture of his late wife’s bones. We’re 99 percent sure that a second date isn’t in the cards.
Before we get into the nuts, bolts, and Pentium-chip-powered paranoia that make up the Shrouds plot once this central concept is introduced, it bears mentioning a real-life tragedy. In 2017, Carolyn Cronenberg — the filmmaker’s longtime collaborator and wife of 43 years — died after being diagnosed with cancer. It’s reductive to view her husband’s film solely through the lens of her death, and virtually impossible to ignore this backstory while you’re watching the movie. David Cronenberg has denied that Cassel’s Karsh is a direct one-to-one counterpart for him, though the character’s slightly poofy gray mane and tasteful, T-shirt-and-blazer wardrobe makes the French actor resemble the writer-director in a manner that splits the difference between subliminal and uncanny. But Cronenberg has admitted that the work is, in its own peculiar yet very on-brand way, a response to dealing with what felt like an unshakable grief. We’re reluctant to use the past tense in that sentence, since Cronenberg has also said that such a profound sense of loss never really, truly leaves you. “Art is not therapy, and there is no catharsis,” he said in a recent interview. “I wouldn’t say it prolongs the pain; it just acknowledges it.”
So yes, The Shrouds is, for all of its hallucinatory imagery and airport-read twists and turns, a blatantly personal film — arguably Cronenberg’s most personal since 1986’s The Fly. It’s also a thriller, albeit one in which everything from chunks of exposition to highly carnal encounters (there’s sex as well as death) is presented with a palpable sense of distance. The day after Karsh’s anti-meet-cute, he gets a call from the graveyard’s security team: Some person or persons unknown have vandalized the premises. Upon further inspection, it appears that saboteurs are responsible. And not only is Becca’s grave trashed, it also seems like whoever did this has tapped into the specific connection between the network and her final resting place. The damage is a front. The real target is data.
Karsh begins digging around, adding “amateur gumshoe” to his résumé. Maybe it has something to do with the odd growths he’s observed sprouting up in the nasal septum of his wife’s skull; he thinks it might be residual cancer, while his conspiracy-theorist sister-in-law Terry thinks it’s a tracking device. Did we mention that she’s also a dead ringer for Becca — they’re twins — and played by Diane Kruger as well? (The German actor also voices Karsh’s flirty AI avatar, adding one more layer to this tale of obsession.) The culprits might be Chinese or Russian rivals, who are looking to stop Karsh from franchising his GraveTech sites overseas. Maury (Guy Pearce), his jittery ex-brother-in-law who still pines for Terry, is a prime suspect as well. So is Becca’s old doctor, who carried a torch for his dying patient and has now gone mysteriously MIA. And is it a coincidence that a terminally ill Hungarian oligarch has suddenly expressed an interest in buying a space in Karsh’s upcoming cemetery in Budapest, and has sent his attractive, blind wife, Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), to broker the deal?
Feel free to place bets on whichever MacGuffins and red herrings suit your fancy — Cronenberg is less interested in who done it and far more intrigued with the emotional contours of how one attempts to move on after a staggering loss — or, perhaps, why you’d want to when grief has become a key part of your identity, which is a far scarier thought he’d like you to muse on. It’s nearly impossible to talk about this auteur’s work without bringing up the phrase “body horror” at least once — holding it back until the eighth paragraph has indeed been a chore — and while other modern filmmakers have taken up the mantle of making squishy, splattery odes to the vulnerability of the corpus humanum, Cronenberg has slowly removed himself from the gross-out racket. His desire to poke, prod, and contemplate the perverse ironies of mortality is still present and accounted for, however. That he’s still exploring this territory with tongue in cheek, cinematic chops intact, and a freshly painful familiarity with human fragility, even via a coldly stylized potboiler that never quite boils, is a godsend. To us, The Shrouds feels like a late-career blessing. To him, it’s a necessity.
You can see shadows of his previous work — notably 1999’s eXistenZ, which also used a conspiracy-thriller template to dig into darker, knottier soil — flicker and flutter throughout this wintry riff on his long-held themes and preoccupations. And in the film’s most striking scenes (not to mention the ones that have continued to haunt us over several viewings), in which Karsh dreams of his late wife returning from surgeries in exponential states of injury, the odd eroticization of scars and staples can’t help but bring to mind his 1996 masterpiece, Crash. “Things are getting weird,” someone says after a few of these sequences have played out, in a prime contender for the most redundant line of dialogue ever uttered in a Cronenberg movie. Yet the primary reference point, especially after a parting shot that suggests even faded grief is everlasting, may be Emily Dickinson’s famous poem about not stopping for Death. Particularly the back half of that first stanza: “The carriage held but just Ourselves/And Immortality.”
From Rolling Stone US
