David Cronenberg’s deeply personal film, The Shrouds, is more like his controversial erotic drama Crash than his more recent work.
PLOT: A prominent businessman (Vincent Cassel), grieving over the death of his wife, invents a company called GraveTech, where corpses are wrapped in technologically enhanced burial shrouds that allow family members to monitor the decaying bodies of their loved ones in real-time.
REVIEW: So, if you read the plot outline posted about, you likely muttered a little “wtf” to yourself once you got to the “monitor the decaying bodies of their loved ones” bit. But hey, The Shrouds is a David Cronenberg movie. Would you want to see one without any WTF moments? I think not. Indeed, The Shrouds has enough ultra-weird imagery and kinky twists to make this Cronenberg’s edgiest movie since Crash and perhaps his most personal work to date.
Tragically, Cronenberg lost his wife several years ago, and The Shrouds seems autobiographical in the way it deals with grief. In it, Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, a tech entrepreneur who once made “industrial films,” a term critics have often used to describe the harsh lighting and cinematography of his earlier works. Cassel is made up to look exactly like Cronenberg, sporting the same distinctive haircut and always favoring dark suits.
Much of Cronenberg’s filmography has been dedicated to body horror. While that term may not totally apply to The Shrouds, it’s still preoccupied with the body and the way it’s mutilated through illness. Karsh’s wife, Becca (Diane Kruger) is shown to have died of an aggressive form of cancer that led to multiple amputations, with him both tortured and oddly aroused (hey, it’s Cronenberg) by visions of her advancing illness. Notably, he keeps talking about how he lost her “body,” with him harbouring paranoia about the doctor who treated her and performed the amputations. He’s preoccupied with the fact that others got to be the last ones to be with parts of her body, and one of the reasons he presumably uses GraveTech is so that he can be the only one with any sense of control over her corpse.
Psychologically, it’s a very complex and provocative work, yet Cassel doesn’t play Karsh as “weird.” He’s actually somewhat charming and seems like he really did love his wife, which has led to issues with him connecting with other women since she died. In a darkly comedic moment early on, he takes a blind date to see his wife’s grave, which contains a video screen showing her corpse’s decay.
As the film goes on, a labyrinthine plot develops, where several GraveTech plots are vandalized, and the corpses seem to be growing nodes on their bones, which may have something to do with the Chinese tech behind the shrouds. Are they being used for surveillance? Seeds of paranoia are planted by Karsh’s former brother-in-law, Guy Pearce’s Maury, who calls himself Karsh’s “brother in grief” after his wife, Terry (also Diane Kruger), leaves him.
The Shrouds is a hard film to describe in that it’s not horror, but it certainly has more gore than you’d expect in a straight drama. It also has elements of sci-fi and even paranoid thrillers, but more than anything, it feels like a pitch-black comedy, with Pearce and Kruger (in both her roles) playing their roles to the hilt.
Yet, it’s also a thoroughly sad film, with Cronenberg likely using it as a way to exorcise some demons, and much of it will hit close to home for anyone who’s ever mourned the death of a loved one. When I interviewed Cronenberg years ago, I was struck by how nice and normal he seemed, and I think part of that is that he’s always been able to use his work therapeutically. While The Shrouds ultimately goes off on many different tangents without ever coming to a clear resolution, it’s insightful about how grief often goes hand-in-hand with paranoia. As such, it hits surprisingly hard by the time the credits roll. It won’t be for everybody, but I’ll say this – even if you don’t like The Shrouds (which is fair), you won’t be bored by it.
