The Shrouds

Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger            

David Cronenberg's The Shrouds opened in competition at Cannes in 2024, but struggled to find a distributor. It eventually had a cursory theatrical run in the US this year. Critics were largely receptive, but this is a very personal film best appreciated by diehard fans of the director and writer. I must say I am a diehard Cronenberg fan and believe The Shrouds is one of the best pictures of the year, but I'm sure it will appear inscrutable to some. For those seeking cinematic adrenalin, this film is a hard pass. However, as with Crimes of the Future, I savored Cronenberg's serene, yet passionate meditation on mortality. The film is funnier than almost all recent comedies and sexier than any erotic thriller in many a moon. Cronenberg's perversity does not align with mass taste, but it is his singularity that is his genius.

The Shrouds was inspired by the death of Cronenberg's wife and features Vincent Cassel (done up to look like the director) as a Cronenberg stand-in named Karsh. Karsh is an industrial filmmaker and entrepreneur who is bent on opening a chain of cemeteries named GraveTech. The company wraps corpses in the titular shrouds that enables video of the decaying corpse to be streamed on the screens on the tombstone and on your phone if you buy the app. Karsh is haunted, literally, by the death of his wife (Diane Kruger), Becca. The first image of the film is of her moldering body in a dream of Karsh's. In the dream, he is literally separated from her and screams. Cronenberg cuts to another nightmarish vision, with Karsh, mouth open again, writhing in his dentist's chair. His dentist tells him his mouth is in bad shape with the diagnosis being the effects of his grief. We are firmly in the body horror territory which Cronenberg mapped out under The Shape of Rage rubric in The Brood. Karsh is devoted to GraveTech not for wealth or fame, but because a perverse romantic obsession drives him; a self-reflexive admission from the auteur.

Vincent Cassel and Guy Pearce

Cronenberg has never been fully appreciated for his black humor. The first major sequence in The Shrouds is a prime example with Karsh involved in a disastrous blind date set up by his AI avatar, voiced by Ms. Kruger and appropriately named Honey. Karsh decides to host the date at his flagship cemetery which boasts a gourmet restaurant. I suppose a goth chick might find this setting romantic, but Karsh's date, deftly played by Jennifer Dale, is appalled, especially when Karsh takes her to the graveyard to see the video of Becca's skeleton. Karsh does attract other female attention, though. He has a barbed and charged relationship with Becca's sister, Terry, also played by Ms. Kruger. Then there is Soo-Min Szabo ( a superb Sandrine Holt), the blind wife of a Hungarian business man who is interested in opening a GraveTech franchise in Budapest. However, her designs on Karsh may be more sinister than romantic.

The picture changes tone, slightly, when Karsh discovers that his cemetery has been vandalized and that the video feeds of the corpses, including Becca's, have been highjacked by unknown hackers. The film morphs into a paranoid thriller wherein Karsh tries to find out what entities are bedeviling him. Terry, who has a conspiratorial slant, provides assistance and a bond between her and Karsh grows. They enlist Terry's ex, Maury (Guy Pearce), who is an expert computer programmer. Maury is a sullen nerd who has had previous fallings out with both Karsh and Terry, the latter characterizing Maury as a schmuck. However, Maury carries around grievances that makes him less than trustworthy. He functions within this film much as fellow computer nerd Harlan does in the cinematic twin to The Shrouds in the Cronenberg canon, Videodrome. In both films, unseen corporations or nation states coop cutting edge technology to usurp control over the bodies and minds of individuals. Who is there for Karsh to trust? His avatar Honey is certainly a dubious guide. Soo-Min is looking out for number one. Then there is the recurring dream Karsh has of Becca in which she seems to be incrementally losing body parts. Certainly, this bodes something sinister in store for Karsh.

I'm not going to spill the beans, but am going to say that I was enthralled with The Shrouds from beginning to end. The quality of the performances in the film is extremely accomplished, even the bit players. Guy Pearce has to tamp down his natural charisma to play a nerd, but he is effective and believable. I was astonished by the range displayed by Diane Kruger in her tripartite roles. I guess I tended to underrate her early in her career, probably because of her background in modeling, but I am now fully onboard the Kruger train. If the film has a flaw, it is Cassel. Like Léa Seydoux in Crimes of the Future, Cassel is saddled by Cronenberg with too many expository monologues for a thespian for who speaks English as a second language. That noted, Cassel is expert in using his body for the role. Cassel sculpts the outline of Karsh's body so that we see it as a steely carapace masking inner vulnerability.

The Shrouds was intended to be an episodic show for Netflix. Each episode would cover GraveTech franchises in separate countries enabling Cronenberg to explore an array of burial customs. Like David Lynch with Mulholland Drive, Cronenberg has fashioned fine cinematic wine from the sour grapes of television.