The Shrouds: Cronenberg captures the obsessional force of grief in a dystopian widower drama
David Cronenberg’s macabre modern love story stars Vincent Cassel as a widowed cemetery owner who invents grave cams for the grieving as a way to make sense of his loss.
- Reviewed from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
David Cronenberg is often still treated as body-horror showman taking us through the looking-glass, when in fact he’s holding the mirror up to us. The Shrouds, which premiered in competition at Cannes, is no different. It was misjudged by some according to genre benchmarks it’s unconcerned with, while actually confronting primal human emotions that concern us all. The macabre starting point – a widower has invented camera-equipped graves for observing the corpse of a loved one – leads into the morass of grief, and how one can nearly go mad reorienting oneself in a world newly without.
The miraculous innovation – witness the title’s echo of the Shroud of Turin – is the handiwork of Karsh (Vincent Cassel), proprietor of an entire cemetery equipped with ‘ShroudCam’. Karsh’s deceased wife, Becca (Diane Kruger, at her best in a while), who died of cancer, rests within one, and the film’s first minutes open with a nightmare Karsh has about looking at her and screaming – a scene which cuts, in pleasantly gonzo fashion, to Karsh awake in a dentist chair, mouth agape. The opening affirms the outlandishness of this world and its ordinariness, with a droll touch about our forms of attachment: the dentist offers to show Karsh JPEGs of his wife’s teeth, which Karsh declines as excessive – this from the guy who invented ShroudCam.
From a genre perspective, the story grows (or, one might say, metastasizes) out of Karsh’s personal entanglements – his wife’s twin sister (Kruger), his hacker brother-in-law (Guy Pearce), a woman he’s dating (Sandrine Holt) – and a suspected international conspiracy relating to the vandalising and data-looting of his cemetery. But to follow the convoluted future-shock plotting (which can suggest a William Gibson novel, or Cronenberg’s own Consumed) seems to miss the heart of The Shrouds as a “moving on” widower drama: in classic can’t-let-go fashion, Karsh takes a date to the restaurant he owns that abuts the Shrouds cemetery. In serial dreams, Becca visits Karsh, communing with him while also sharing the pain and mastectomy scars of her cancer treatment, the losses relived.
Through this lens, the twists and intrigues are partly a distraction from the actual emotional throughline, and partly a narrative manifestation of obsessional thinking that sees the world crumbling at the edges. Karsh’s troubles and nightmares confirm that, while he’s extended his intimacy with his wife into uncharted corporeal realms, he has not successfully innovated his way out of grief; despite his urbane surface affect, he has perhaps prolonged his pain, or at the very least, not fully translated his technology into a spiritually and emotionally satisfying ritual.
This might be the moment to gloss the autobiographical aspect of the film: it’s only Cronenberg’s second feature since the death of his wife of 43 years in 2017. Karsh is styled unmistakably with the director’s silver mane of hair, and in an interview the director said he’d asked the actor to replicate his Toronto accent. The genre machinations of The Shrouds can therefore feel like a grappling with a deep loss in this artist’s chosen language. Cronenberg has long used genre’s freedoms to liberate our empathic imagination to feel something forbidden or unfamiliar, or something so familiar that he gives us a combined estrangement and gross bear-hug to feel it anew – grief as a ghost story made flesh, and prolonged thanks to ShroudCam.
Beyond the decaying bodies, The Shrouds pushes into the dystopian details of swirling unseen forces of power that accrued in Crimes of the Future (2022) or even Cosmopolis (2012). Karsh’s computer is equipped with an AI avatar (voiced by Kruger) that takes queries but also keeps messing with him. The disjunction between its cheery emoji-sticker looks and its suspicious behavior feels true to the current uncertainty surrounding the technology, while Pearce’s character spins out elaborate conspiracies about the AI and more. But the film is shot less as a conspiracy thriller than as chamber drama, distinct from Cronenberg’s previous psychodramas perhaps partly because on this and Crimes he worked with a different cinematographer, Douglas Koch, than his hand-in-glove alchemist of space, Peter Suschitzky.
For that reason, The Shrouds can feel a bit more room-bound, talky, and less concerned with a kind of transformative dynamism than other works by Cronenberg. These aren’t shortcomings, but reflections in a natural shifting of filmmaking energies (in a manner some critics have already described as a “late style”). If the oft-abused term of body horror applies, it isn’t necessarily about the horrors of the decaying body, but of the horror of its no longer being there – which means that above all, Cronenberg has made a love story.