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'THE SHROUDS' IS DAVID CRONENBERG'S BEST IN YEARS

by Matt Wedge

Because of an outdated reputation as a filmmaker who crafts emotionally cold, viscerally disgusting horror films, the humanistic side of David Cronenberg’s work has seemingly been ignored by all but the most invested of his fans. But the wide streak of empathy that Cronenberg has for his characters has arguably been present as far back as RABID.

The confusion about Cronenberg having a bleak or cruel view of humanity comes from the fact that he drops his often sympathetic protagonists (Max Renn from VIDEODROME aside) into such extreme horror scenarios, the very humanity that Cronenberg and his actors imbue them with is often what is their ultimate undoing. I bring this up because THE SHROUDS continues Cronenberg’s evolution of still putting sympathetic characters through the genre wringer, but their torture here is more of the psychological than body horror variety.

To be fair, given the plot setup, most viewers would be forgiven if they assumed that THE SHROUDS was a throwback to Cronenberg’s classic body horror era like 2022’s CRIMES OF THE FUTURE was.

Set in a very near-future Toronto, THE SHROUDS follows Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a successful businessman who is dealing with the grief over his wife’s passing in a very unusual way. Karsh co-owns a franchise of specialty cemeteries.

Using specially altered burial shrouds, the dead buried in Karsh’s cemeteries can be viewed in their graves by their loved ones via an app.

Early in the film, Karsh wastes little time telling an increasingly uneasy blind date (and the audience) about his wife Becca’s death from cancer and opens his app to show her now skeletal remains in her grave.

While Cronenberg quickly establishes Karsh as consumed by grief from Becca’s death four years earlier, the film pivots from the potentially grotesque idea of a voyeurism of the dead that borders on a necrophilia fantasy. Instead, it turns into an exploration of paranoia, conspiracy theories, the danger of relying too much on artificial intelligence, the environmental impacts of burial practices, and global politics.

Because it is pushed in all of these directions by the grief felt by Karsh, Becca’s sister Terry (Diane Kruger), and Terry’s ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce), THE SHROUDS is another of Cronenberg’s family dramas seen through a genre lens ala THE BROOD, THE FLY, and DEAD RINGERS. Unlike those films, the sensibility here is gentler with a focus more on trying to understand why each of these characters are willing to buy into conspiracy theories or turn to artificial intelligence to deal with grief.

Not surprisingly, THE SHROUDS draws from Cronenberg’s loss of his wife of several decades to cancer. What is surprising is how much humor he finds in the material. From the cringe-inducing dark comedy of the blind date to Karsh’s interactions with the neurotic Terry and conspiracy-minded Maury that border on sitcomish at times, the movie is surprisingly playful.

Cassel’s performance, in particular, is light and nimble as he plays Karsh with a mixture of bemusement and unexpected sweetness that throws the darker edges of the character into stark relief. It’s very good work by Cassel since, as the film never leaves his point of view, if he were to lean too heavily into a single gloomy/weepy note the movie could quickly become a slog.

Where the film runs into issues is in piling idea on top of idea and question on top of question, with only the vaguest offering of even trying to answer what is being asked. For the most part, that ambiguity works as Karsh increasingly becomes unable to tell when he is awake or when he is dreaming, making him an unreliable narrator. Any answers he might find could not be trusted as accurate. But by the time Cronenberg introduces the potential of industrial espionage and hacking of Karsh’s app by hostile foreign governments, THE SHROUDS has drifted so far from its initial exploration of grief that the audience is left unmoored.

But having too much on the mind is never a bad thing for a movie and is honestly one of the trademarks of Cronenberg’s work. THE SHROUDS also finds Cronenberg continuing on his late-career tendency to reach back to his previous films, making it a fascinating piece of work just to see what ideas and obsessions still resonate with the filmmaker. Most notable here is the use of doppelgangers and twins to blur the line between sanity and madness for his protagonist as he did in THE BROOD and DEAD RINGERS.

Becca is played in dream sequences by Kruger as Karsh relives the toll that surgeries took on her body through a surreal lens eventually leading him to turn to her sister Terry in an ill-advised attempt at romance to move on. But the most interesting double here is that Karsh is not just a conduit through which Cronenberg explores his own grief, he appears to be intended to be playing the director himself. Not only is Cassel styled to look very similar to the filmmaker, he uses his own form of art of putting decomposition on display to work through his grief (and make a buck in the process).

Where Karsh diverges from Cronenberg is in his near-unblinking embrace of the newest technology available. Aside from a brief moment of paranoia that he may not be able to trust “Hunny,” the artificial intelligence assistant created for him by the borderline unhinged Maury (in another nod to the way Becca haunts Karsh’s existence, Hunny is voiced by Kruger), Karsh never comes close to questioning how new technologies could potentially create more problems than they solve. The man even unironically drives a Tesla, just to drive the point all the way home.

Cronenberg at least seems to want the viewer to question the technological leaps found in the film. One of the side effects of the technology used in Karsh’s cemeteries is the potential for radioactive waste to seep into the ground. The film clearly presents Hunny as an untrustworthy use of artificial intelligence as she makes Karsh vulnerable to hackers and can be used as a spy by Maury as he obsesses over the idea that the relationship between Karsh and Terry may have turned sexual. Despite THE SHROUDS approaching new technologies with an (at best) ambiguous view, the film eventually comes to the conclusion that, for better or worse, there is no stopping them. That may be the most unsettling idea in the film.

THE SHROUDS is not for everyone. Fans of Cronenberg’s grotesque “King of venereal horror” phase might be let down by the restraint the film shows in its brief depictions of decomposition. Mainstream audiences expecting a thriller about international espionage will definitely not get what they want. Even art house audiences may be thrown by the way the film veers away from a look at all-encompassing grief to pose questions about the impact on the world that technological advances have.

But it cannot be denied that it is unlike anything else currently in theaters. I personally found the dreamlike atmosphere the film achieves while considering Cronenberg’s philosophical questions hard to shake. It’s his best work since his potent one-two punch of A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE and EASTERN PROMISES almost twenty years ago.

THE SHROUDS is in theaters now, and highly recommended.

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