Written and Directed by David Cronenberg | 119 min | ▲▲▲▲ | VOD
An earlier version of this review appeared on FITI in September 2024 during coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival.
David Cronenberg isn’t the only legendary filmmaker in his 80s still making interesting, relevant films, or at the very least taking big swings — consider recent work by Martin Scorcese, Mike Leigh, Francis Ford Coppola, and Ridley Scott. But I would put Cronenberg at the top of that list for sheer audacious nerve, and for tapping into the dark heart of career-long storytelling obsessions in The Shrouds and his last film, Crimes Of The Future, following a bit of a dip on Maps To The Stars.
The Shrouds was inspired by the death of Cronenberg’s wife, Carolyn Zeifman, but this isn’t terribly sentimental or heartfelt — it’s more of a piece with earlier work like Crash and Videodrome.
Vincent Cassel is Karsh, a tech wizard with a very Cronenbergian hair and look, whose wife (Diane Kruger) died years before. To ease his grief he’s come up with a tech that he’s franchising worldwide — it allows families to witness the slow decay of their loved ones’ bodies in the grave via a screen on the tombstone — or an app on their phones.
How, exactly, this could be a solace is a mystery left up to the viewer. Cronenberg has said that when they buried his wife, he had the sudden urge to climb into the casket with her mortal remains.
This graveside tech, however, can be hacked. Someone wants to track and exploit Karsh through this invention, so Karsh seeks help from his friend and tech advisor, Maury (Guy Pearce). Also on the scene is Karsh’s “terminally neurotic” sister-in-law, Terry, whose kink is deceit, and his AI, Hunny (both Kruger). We spend time in Karsh’s romantic life, too — he’s dating a woman named Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), who is blind.
Cronenberg dances through multiple tones here, managing all of them with a chilly grace — from grim and gloomy to an unexpectedly snappy tech thriller to a satire on conspiracy theorists. It’s a genre trip, while also being undeniably and entirely Cronenbergian: an interest in the natural and unnatural places where technology intersects with our fleshy biology, where body consciousness becomes body horror. Mutilation, and sexual taboos — even necrophilia — are touched upon. I also enjoyed, perversely, that the film doesn’t really have a conclusion — it just stops. You know you’re in the grasp of an iconoclast when the thing that would annoy you in other films ends up seeming both inevitable and ideal.
Cronenberg has said The Shrouds is unlikely to be his final film, which is encouraging. If it is, it’s a satisfying conclusion to a career that started out in the wilderness of Canadian exploitation and avant garde strangeness, found its way to box office hits and global prestige, and has now returned to a place where I suspect it’s really only for a niche audience of weirdos. I’m thrilled to be part of that audience.
