David Cronenberg is the undisputed king of body horror, though this title doesn’t accurately prepare you for the emotional core that beats beneath The Shrouds.
Cronenberg has always been fascinated with bodily evolutions, transformations, and death, but his latest film is guided by the intangible – grief, bizarre coffin humor, and suspicion, ending in a quiet yet oddly comforting nihilism.
The Shrouds follows GraveTech’s experimental entrepreneur Karsh (Vincent Cassel) as he transforms and buries his grief over his recently deceased wife Becca (Diane Kruger). His refusal to move on from her death inspires him to engineer a grave that offers the mourner a live look at their loved ones as their flesh decays into their shrouds. His heartbreak, and suppression of it, reach a breaking point when his cyber cemetery is desecrated and he is subsequently catapulted into film noir paranoia as suspicion of a vast conspiracy engulfs him.
Six years after his wife’s death and in the wake of her gravesite’s vandalism, he desperately grasps for answers and meaning in his heartbreak in all the wrong places. He spirals down with theories; that it’s a government conspiracy and the military will use his stolen data, or that cancer didn’t kill his wife, but instead it was the result of medical experiments and tracking devices disguised as polyps, overseen by a doctor with whom she’d previously had a tryst. He’s even suspicious that his cartoon AI assistant and pseudo-Becca replacement is colluding with the invisible enemy. Karsh relentlessly follows his rabbit hole down further and further, all the while he’s unable to see that the resolution he seeks is only given by reckoning with the meaninglessness of death itself.
Cronenberg’s obvious self-insert Karsh is brought to life by Vincent Cassel, who has no easy task in this film as he portrays a deeply heartbroken man suppressing his grief into oblivion, but he and the film seem to suffer from rigor mortis. The Shrouds was meant to unfold over ten episodes on Netflix but ultimately fell through and as a result, the story’s ideas feel too big to explore in such little time. The ideas themselves are nuanced and revelatory in how we’ve come to expect from and love about David Cronenberg. The film’s reverberates of an emotional turmoil consciously and constantly rejected, and longtime collaborator Howard Shoe’s synth score allows that banished pain to seep through. The Shrouds features of the few memorable, splashy moments that made Cronenberg king, but instead immerses the viewer in a slow, spiraling, and at times dryly funny tragedy that gnaws at you. Guy Pearce, playing Karsh’s brother-in-law Maury, shines and perfectly nails the tone, as his earnest quirkiness grounds the story but is never played for laughs, allowing us to do so.
Across his filmography, it’s abundantly clear that David Cronenberg was given the gift of foresight, utilized almost exclusively through his morbid lens, and The Shrouds cements this. Current technology is integral to and inextricable from the plot (Teslas and AI abound) and explored in form (FaceTime conversations are dynamic and feel new). Simultaneously he sees the future, predicting the horrific ways technology will modernize, and more importantly monetize, the human experience in terrifyingly furthers us from it. It’s impossible not to place this film in the context of his life, as his wife and collaborator Carolyn Cronenberg sadly passed in 2017 and this film was birthed from his sorrow. Though he asserts that film is not his therapy for the devastating loss, The Shrouds presents us with a window into his world, and in turn, our own.
