MIFF 2024 | ‘The Shrouds’ review: David Cronenberg’s confounding exploration of personal grief
The Canadian body-horror maestro returns with a perplexing autobiographical thanatopsis that loses sight of itself within its own half-baked subplots.
Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger in “The Shrouds.” Image courtesy of SBS Productions.
“Grief is rotting your teeth,” or so billionaire Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel) is told during a routine checkup at the dentist’s, in the opening scene of David Cronenberg’s new film. Despite all appearances, the slick, silver-haired tech magnate is emotionally lost at sea; still mourning his late wife’s passing after her gruelling battle with lymphoma. But Karsh’s teeth are not the only thing that his all-consuming grief is affecting. Formerly a producer of industrial videos, Karsh has kickstarted a new and exclusive business venture in the wake of his wife’s loss — creating burial “shrouds” that function as high-definition cameras capturing every detail of an interred corpse, so that its loved ones may watch on as it decomposes beneath the earth.
Karsh himself is obsessed with his wife’s own “shroud-cam.” Every day, he spends hours painstakingly examining the 3D, 8K model of her rotting corpse; running his fingers lovingly across his iPad screen as he enlarges and rotates different sections of her mouldering bones to his heart’s content. Inspired by the Jewish funerary belief that the soul lingers above the body after death and is only truly able to depart for the afterlife upon complete decomposition of its former earthly vessel, Karsh too hopes that his grief will soon pass in the same way; hence never wavering from his morbid vigil, even at the price of scaring away prospective new paramours.
The body does not grow in death; it only diminishes. And yet, one day, Karsh’s usual virtual visitation of his wife’s body reveals strange growths on her bones that were not there before. Intent on investigating these anomalies, he turns to two unusual confidantes — his dead wife’s twin sister Terry (Diane Kruger), a neurotic dog groomer who gets sexually aroused by conspiracy theories, and Terry’s ex-husband, paranoid deep-web hacker Maury (Guy Pearce). What follows is a bizarre, labyrinthine chain of events leading Karsh (and us viewers) down a demented, psychosexual rabbit hole of death, doppelgangers, and possible foreign deep state espionage with no rhyme, reason, or anything remotely resembling a conclusion.
Made in response to his wife’s own death, “The Shrouds” is clearly meant to be Cronenberg’s own way of processing his grief through the creation of art. Deeply personal and autobiographical from the get-go, this film is, in a metatextual way, Cronenberg’s equivalent of Karsh’s shrouds; we are invited to watch his private melancholy play out on the silver screen in the same way that Karsh’s clients voyeuristically watch their loved ones’ bodies atrophy on their phones. Vincent Cassel is even made up to look like Cronenberg himself — another wry nod towards both the multi-dimensional layers that the director is playing with, and the theme of uncanny twinning that he is so well-known for.
In some ways, perhaps Cronenberg’s metatextual gamble makes sense when looking at the bigger picture. Since time immemorial, humans have made up stories to make sense of the mysteries of life; to make ourselves feel a little less small and insignificant in an otherwise vast, unknown, and hostile world. In the Stone Age, these stories took the form of creation myths. Now, in our postmodern, post-information era, these stories look more like conspiracy theories; narratives accessible only by those special enough or smart enough to thwart the safeguards put up by an “elite few.” What better way would there be, then, to represent the tricky, almost everlasting nature of a loved one’s death than through the unresolvable and unprovable enigma of a tinfoil-hat theory?
However, as the film progresses, the line between metafiction and reality becomes extremely blurry. The conspiracy theories that Karsh, Terry, and Maury discuss never quite resolve themselves into anything coherent, leaving viewers flailing for purpose barely halfway into the film’s two-hour runtime. Hot-button nationalities and phrases — the Russians, the Chinese, intervention, surveillance — are peppered into the script to provoke knee-jerk intrigue or ire, causing the film to veer dangerously close to participating in the thinly-concealed racism and xenophobia that it claims to merely be satirising. By the time the film’s freakish final scene has faded to black, what we are left with is a perplexing meditation on grief and mourning that loses itself within the knotty threads of its own half-baked subplots.
To add insult to injury, longtime Cronenberg fans aren’t even given the consolation prize of taking in a visually or stylistically interesting film. “The Shrouds” is severely lacking in any distinct visual aesthetic beyond the neutered, charmless veneer of modern corpocratic wealth. Such formalist detachment worked for the Canadian auteur with his 2012 Don DeLillo adaptation, “Cosmopolis,” but feels wholly out of place when paired with a script as ripe for playful and grotesque visual experimentation as this. This arguably could have been a deliberate choice by Cronenberg, but that doesn’t make its total blandness — especially given its grisly and unusual subject matter — any more disappointing.
Compared to the unique visual leitmotifs that most of his oeuvre incorporates — the slime and sludge of “The Fly,” the staticky red rooms of “Videodrome,” and the H.R. Giger-esque machinery languishing amidst urban decay in “Crimes of the Future” — the soulless Orientalist ripoff of Karsh’s Japanese-style apartment and the simple, blank GraveTech funerary slabs seem uninspired and dull. Not even an Yves Saint Laurent costume design credit can save the film from its otherwise boring art direction and uncreative cinematographic execution, let alone its comically unsubtle Tesla product placement and overall dearth of style and artistic vision.
Thanks to Cronenberg’s deadpan directorial style and the strange, stilted nature of his screenplay (that had multiple viewers in my screening laughing at very inappropriate moments), it is possible that no two people will see “The Shrouds” the same way. The ambiguity that surrounds every aspect of the film’s philosophical messages has been a point of frustration for many critics, myself included, but others have also seen it as a thematic masterstroke emphasising the lack of closure we often receive in real life. Cronenberg himself is surely no stranger to his films receiving a polarised reception. Perhaps this duality, too, is by design. But, like much about “The Shrouds,” it is hard to tell whether any of its possible high notes are intentional… and in the same way, it is hard to praise what you cannot tell is real.
