Review: The Shrouds

Director:  David Cronenberg

Stars:  Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce

Even when freely adapting the work of others, David Cronenberg’s films have still managed to feel uniquely his own, but even when considered in relation to his madly dreamed-up originals, The Shrouds seems his most nakedly personal. He suffered two particularly heavy losses between 2017 and 2020; his wife of nearly 40 years, Carolyn, and then his sister (and regular creative collaborator) Denise. We all process our grief differently. His response, in part, has been to project it outward into his latest science fiction enquiry. At 120 minutes, it’s his longest film (he’s always been admirably direct and concise), a slow-moving but restless unspooling direct from within. A documented open wound.

The Shrouds centres around Toronto businessman Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel), a one-time industrial film producer who has recently – perhaps in the four years since his wife Becca’s death – set up a new business venture. Aided by the digital knowhow of his ex-brother-in-law Maury (Guy Pearce), Karsh has created GraveTech, a kind of funeral services outfit that offers grievers unique access to the bodies of their dearly departed. Their corpses wrapped in special designed burial shrouds, Karsh’s gravestones become viewing portals where the living can observe – from any angle and in 8K – the decaying remains below them.

Cronenberg has done little to mask the autobiographical elements in his film. Cassel’s hair is swept back, making him look the spitting image of the director, and Karsh shares his twinklingly subversive, dry sense of humour. Following probably the funniest transition of the filmmaker’s career, we effectively open with Karsh agape at the dentist, where the idea of grief as disease is half-seriously floated. What unfolds is something like a kind of overactive mind-rot. When the Toronto GraveTech cemetery is vandalised, Karsh becomes vulnerable to all manner of conspiracy theories. Everything from Russian heavies to Chinese data-hackers to Icelandic eco-terrorists. The Shrouds implies that these theories are some kind of obsessive coping mechanism, leaving Karsh exposed to attack and manipulation by those around him. It posits that grief itself is like a conspiracy theory; labyrinthine and unsolvable.

There are self-reflexive elements built into this idea, too. The dead remain such a taboo talking point, so closely connected to raw emotions. Karsh is kindred to Cronenberg in his willingness to get creative in ways that will court controversy. They’re both provocateurs. Karsh’s incessant curiosity gets him into trouble. The ruining of the gravestones feels like a metaphor for the critical and moral uproar Cronenberg met with Crash. Karsh is flummoxed that anyone’s that bothered.

The importance of physical closeness – and how it is missed – is another important through-line here. Karsh’s efforts with GraveTech facilitate his own personal compulsion to get into the grave with his dead wife; to remain with her remains. He pursues the idea of new sexual partners almost reluctantly, and down this avenue meets Sandrine Holt’s Soo-Min, the blind daughter of a potential investor. Soo-Min gets to know Karsh through touch, reaching out to stroke his face. For all the digital removes that Karsh and the modern world place between people, the tactile is what’s yearned for – and still needed – most keenly.

It’s also provocatively voyeuristic. The screens surveilling the dead feel intrusive in ways that each viewer will have to reconcile, but speak to a filmmaker’s irrepressible desire to look, to peer, to push-in. When Karsh’s dentist admits to still having Becca’s files, he saucily offers them up, “Do you want jpegs?” The Shrouds is more than happy to poke the bear with intellectual – yet cheeky – notions of necrophilia.

Persistently curious yet as soulful as Cronenberg has ever been, The Shrouds is like a dark daydream that it’s creator has leisurely allowed to unfurl. Shrouded itself in Howard Shore’s sad synths, it’s perhaps as indulgent as it’s maker has ever been. But in sharing his inner workings with us through this – his art – he’s made the deeply personal into something generous.

Perhaps inevitably, it feels in conversation with his other works, without explicitly or even deliberately referencing them. The cranium-cracking conspiratorial chatter of eXistenZ. The dead ringers of Dead Ringers. The intensely choreographed sex scenes of Crash. The autopsy talk of Crimes of the Future. And the physical manifestations of trauma itemised in The Brood. Echoes or extensions of ideas and themes that have pre-occupied the Canadian master for decades. It feels a little like Twin Peaks: The Return in this respect; an accidental career summation even as it ceaselessly moves forward toward new horizons.

Cassel is the best he’s ever been. Karsh feels lived-in and studied (perhaps having your source directing you is a particular advantage), but even greater praise ought be levelled at Diane Kruger who does triple duty here as the deceased Becca, her very-much-alive identical twin sister Terry and as the voice of Karsh’s chirpy AI assistant Hunny. She’s a true triple-threat here, and her approach to each of these entities feels deliberate and delineated. Cronenberg also asks a lot of her physically, and Kruger steps up to the plate in the same spirit as actors who have preceded her.

Because who wouldn’t walk across burning coals to be a part of this legacy? The Shrouds is factually positioned in Cronenberg’s canon as a late-period effort. He’s in his 80s now. Of course there’ll be one about mortality. But, more keenly, about living. This filmmaker has always been immersed in the intensity of being alive. In it’s fluctuations, deviations and bodily possibilities. That spirit continues here apace. It won’t be for everyone (the conspiratorial back-and-forth is deliberately dizzying), but that’s true of anything, even Marvel movies.

In a movie marketplace that is steered intensely to the middle ground – to anything that doesn’t challenge us – mavericks like Cronenberg are more precious than ever. Their works shouldn’t be minimalised by risk-averse cinema chains, but celebrated and awarded space beside everything else. As for The Shrouds, I could have lived in it’s dreamy world for hours more. Maybe that’s something I should worry about. But I’m immeasurably glad to have visited.