THE SHROUDS
(The 2024 New York Film Festival (NYFF) runs September 27-October 14. Check out M.J. O’Toole’s The Shrouds movie review from the fest. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
No other mind exists in cinema like David Cronenberg’s. The iconic director has been regarded more for his body horror (Videodrome and The Fly, to name a few), which put him on the map. His newest film, The Shrouds, is a sardonic, somewhat dystopian observation of how society poisons itself for some sort of relief or gratification. Inspired by the loss of his wife of forty-plus years, Cronenberg’s 23rd feature centers on a character and his crisis in a way that feels more philosophical and romantic rather than thrilling or skin-crawling. There are no grotesque transformations, exploding heads, or highway masochism like in his previous films. You can’t judge The Shrouds based on what you would normally expect from the director, but rather on how well he translates his ideas on screen. But Cronenberg’s most personal and melancholic film is also his funniest, using plenty of deadpan humor that fits well into this new society he has created. “Body is reality,” says a character from his 2022 thriller Crimes of the Future. But what happens to a person’s reality when a loved one is lying six feet under?
The movie follows Karsch Relikh (Vincent Cassel), a Toronto-based entrepreneur whose company GraveTech has developed a burial shroud line that allows mourners, through an app, to view their loved ones’ rotting remains in 3D in his unusually extravagant cemetery (and restaurant all in one). It’s also where his late wife Becca (Diane Kruger) resides, having died a year earlier from a cancer that removed a breast and one of her arms. These cocoon-like burial shrouds, or “ominous metallic ninja things” as one character puts it, are the kind you might find at fashion week. It’s no wonder that fashion giant Saint Laurent is a co-producer on the film, and is responsible for some of the costume design. The loss of his wife has put Karsh in a state of detachment – along with eroding teeth – as he hopes his morbid invention will allow people to maintain a closeness with the bodies of their dearly departed. Seeing a livestream of her decaying corpse puts him in a state of both comfort and anguish. He remains close with his sister-in-law, Becca’s twin Terry (also played by Kruger), as they find a kinship over their shared grief, and perhaps an underlying attraction. Cronenberg keenly displays the different ways loss can manifest itself. But when Karsh comes under threat, his grief process shifts from longing to theorizing conspiracies in a way that the director explores with a rare intimacy and vulnerability.
Karsh is on the verge of expanding GraveTech worldwide, working on setting up shop in Budapest with Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the savvy widow of a Hungarian entrepreneur. Their relationship transcends the usual business transaction as the two relate to one another with their respective losses. But when his cemetery is vandalized, Karsh wonders whether it was a random attack or if certain graves were targeted. From here he turns to Maury (a ruffled Guy Pearce), Terry’s techy ex-husband who installs the cemetery’s security systems to help him figure out who could be behind this. This is one of many things Karsh is trying to get to the bottom of. As he longingly observes his wife’s decaying corpse one night, he discovers bumps inside her skull that wouldn’t normally appear on human remains. As he considers the idea of them being caused by her cancer treatment (or maybe even as a sign of new life), his dreams of Becca get the better of him. He has erotic visions of her appearing before him, with each dream having her missing various body parts. Cronenberg knows how to balance the melancholic and the creepy. He drops Karsh down the rabbit hole of sexual and international intrigue: Russian hackers, an Icelandic connection, a radiologist who’s also a Chinese spy, and even a sus yet catty AI assistant (modeled after Becca). As one event leads to another, Karsh tries to figure out if Becca’s death and the vandalism in his cemetery might be connected, especially when loyalties are questioned. Can anyone around him really be trusted?
Cronenberg fans will marvel at this uniquely-styled mixture of sex, death, and (not so) futuristic technology. But the director approaches these subjects with enough sensitivity in a way that also feels humanistic. You can tell how personal this is for him based on his deep, darkly funny dialogue and how his protagonist’s grief manifests. In his third collaboration with Cronenberg, Vincent Cassel embodies a sense of calm – playing against type – even as his character goes down a hole of angst and paranoia. He approaches the world with a grand sense of curiosity rather than trepidation or mania. No business expansion or mystery is enough to fill the hole of sorrow that’s within him. Many parallels have been drawn between the main character and the director, from their hairstyles, to their shared atheism, to their very similar loss. Perhaps the burial shrouds are a way for the filmmaker to illustrate his own beliefs on body, soul, and the afterlife. Though not as graphic as Cronenberg’s past films, The Shrouds is a bold, more introspective undertaking from the director that requires the viewer to look underneath its characters’ fleshy parts. His body of work reaches a new height that subtly raises the question of where and how far we would look for signs of our dearly departed.
– M.J. O’Toole (@mj_otoole93)
New York Film Festival; David Cronenberg; The Shrouds