(David Cronenberg, 2024, Canada, 119 minutes)
Since it premiered at Cannes, David Cronenberg's 21st feature, The Shrouds, has been described as his most personal film.
Near as I can tell, this is meant as a compliment; at the very least, it's simply a neutral observation. The filmmaker has also said as much, but at worst, it implies that his previous films weren't personal, and I believe many of them are, and not just because he has a distinctly recognizable style or because he's been exploring certain themes since 1969's Stereo, which established a template for an ongoing project involving attempts to connect, a willingness to experiment, and the rejection of societal norms.
In a recent conversation with Jim Jarmusch for Interview, Cronenberg regrets that his films have often been described as "cold." That isn't how he sees them. Stanley Kubrick was bedeviled by the same descriptor--even as he ended his career with a film about a marriage that wasn't just an adaptation of a text with which he had long been obsessed, but played, intentionally or otherwise, as a reflection on his own 41-year union.
Cronenberg was married to editor Carolyn Cronenberg, who passed away in 2017, for nearly as long. Though his last film, 2022's Crimes of the Future, relied on a script he had written 20 years before, it also revolves around a marriage. One that has its challenges, but is built to last for as long as Saul (Viggo Mortensen, director of last year's The Dead Don't Hurt) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux, who was originally cast in the film) remain on Earth.
Because it's a Cronenberg production, these performance artists (left) aren't tempted by other people so much as their desire to push the human body as far as it can go, and not just as a vocation, but because it unites them, despite--or even because of--the physical risks.
The director's films may incorporate elements of horror and science fiction, but that makes them no less personal than those that exclude such trappings, and Crimes of the Future played as a reflection on his own marriage, not least because it was his first feature since Caroline's passing (significantly, it followed the Bruce Wagner-written Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars, which seems less personal and less characteristic alike).
The Shrouds plays like a successor to Crimes of the Future (the second, and not the first film with the same title that appeared a year after Stereo). It isn't just personal, but more overtly biographical. If Crimes touched on the fear of losing a partner, the new film takes place after a partner has died.
Cronenberg introduces silver-haired doppelgänger Karsh (Vincent Cassel from Eastern Promises), co-owner of a high-tech cemetery, after the death of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). On the surface, he's moved on, since he's dating again, but his health has been suffering. Unlike Saul, this isn't by choice. "Grief," his dentist tells him drily, "is rotting your teeth."
There are many ways to deal with grief, but Karsh's is uniquely Cronenbergian, because at any time he can log on to his GraveTech app to activate the Shroudcam connected to Becca's grave in order to view the nude, decomposing body of a once-attractive woman. Oddly, she recalls the nude, decomposing, once-attractive woman from Kubrick-by-way-of-King's The Shining--but without the zombie element.
GraveTech plans to expand so that European mourners can also watch their loved ones decompose. No doubt the company seeks to boost their profits, as well. I can't think of anything I would want less, but I've never felt Cronenberg is asking audiences to sympathize with the methods in his movies--to the extent that he once made a Freudian film called A Dangerous Method--so much as the reasons why a protagonist would want to use or invent the means to fill a certain need. The main thing is the need.
Karsh isn't a solitary figure. He maintains friendships with computer guy Maury (Guy Pearce) and Becca's ex-veterinarian sister, Terry (also played by Kruger), Maury's ex-wife (in contrast with his industrialist in The Brutalist, Pearce is in twitchy, geek mode here). The women's resemblance establishes a link with 1988's Dead Ringers and its twin doctors and twin patients.
When Karsh notices polyps on his wife's corpse, he consults Terry, but she dismisses the whole GraveTech thing as creepy. When a stranger sends him video in which they're desecrating the cemetery, The Shrouds turns into a mystery, and Karsh consults Maury, who finds the whole GraveTech thing both weird and beautiful, noting that Becca's body looks like its floating in outer space.
The desecration ends the Shroudcam transmissions. Beyond Terry and Maury, Karsh also turns to his AI chatbot-style personal assistant Hunny (voiced by Kruger). Instead of a simulacram of a human being, Hunny looks like a bubbly cartoon version of Becca, an odd choice on Cronenberg's part, but then the tech in his films isn't always especially sleek or sophisticated. EXistenZ, from 1999, with its gristle guns and umbilical cord-like cables is a case in point, though the makeup effects here are quite convincing.
While Karsh meets with people who might know what's going on--when he isn't cavorting with wealthy, visually-impaired client Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt)--he dreams about his wife. Cassel and Kruger appear nude in these sequences, though DP Douglas Koch's hazy lighting obscures as much as it reveals. Becca starts out intact before losing body parts and gaining stitches and staples as the result of cancer. This isn't presented as body horror, necessarily. Karsh accepts her changed body, reminding me of Rosanna Arquette's post-accident form in Cronenberg's Ballard adaptation Crash.
It's suggested, for instance, that certain nefarious forces were using Becca as a test subject. This adds intrigue to the scenario, and if it were a thriller like Michael Crichton's corpse-filled Coma from 1978, Karsh would become a target while trying to bring these forces to justice. On the contrary, when a loved one dies, some survivors would rather blame a conspiracy theory than accept the facts.
Russell Banks in his original novel and fellow Torontonian Atom Egoyan in his 1997 adaptation explored this impulse in The Sweet Hereafter. It's possible that these scenarios aren't even real; that they're all in Karsh's head.
Though I've never thought of Cronenberg as an impersonal filmmaker, The Shrouds is personal in ways that go beyond the obvious. For one, his Jewishness is integral to the plot. Though Karsh isn't Jewish, Becca was, and she didn't believe in cremation (though some adherents do). If Karsh had acted against his wife's wishes, this would be a different film--more likely, it wouldn't exist at all. Karsh and Maury are also particularly fond of a Jewish deli from which the former orders in a pastrami sandwich and matzo ball soup to keep his friend fortified while he works on the central mystery.
Then there's Cronenberg's country of origin. Though he has often filmed in Canada and worked with Canadian actors, his films tend to feel more placelessly Cronenbergian than specifically Canadian. In this one, however, Toronto plays Toronto. It's only on screen for a few seconds, but when Maury lifts a paper cup to his mouth, I noticed the unmistakable logo of a certain national coffee chain: a white maple leaf against a red background.
Later, Karsh and Terry are silhouetted against the picture window of his high-rise as the city lights twinkle below. Off to the left, and impossible to miss: the tall, spindly outline of the CN Tower. Since Crimes, Cronenberg has also worked with a local cinematographer rather than a British one. As he told The Film Stage, Douglas Koch is "a very Canadian, very Toronto guy."
The Shrouds concludes with what Cronenberg considers a happy ending, while acknowledging that it's pretty ambiguous.
Throughout the film, Karsh has been seeing signs of Becca in other women, and with her sister Terry, it's unavoidable. He flies off into the future with a version of that image that may or may not be real. Because Cronenberg is at the controls, Karsh never comes across as mentally unstable, and since he's such an unruffled figure throughout, as exemplified by the Zen-like home decor complete with koi pond, it's hard to tell if he's just imagining things.
The filmmaker, who is 82, has said The Shrouds may be his last film, and it certainly has a reflective or valedictory feel, though the widowed Karsh gets plenty of action, so it isn't as if he--or his director--has lost all interest in other women. The cool effect, however, doesn't always play to the film's benefit. It may not be cold, and Vincent Cassel is fine, but a more charged atmosphere or urgent performance wouldn't have been amiss, since it feels more like a coda or an epilogue than a final statement, though you can always count on Cronenberg to steer clear of self-pity and sentimentality.
The entire film, a surprisingly wry affair in light of the somber subject matter, is handily summed up by an early exchange between Karsh and Maury. "That's your grief strategy?" Maury asks about his friend's obsession with his wife's decaying body. "Well," Karsh shrugs, "It's an approach."
The Shrouds opens at SIFF Cinema Uptown on Friday, April 25. Images from Janus Films by way of the IMDb (Vincent Cassel), Artforum (Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux), Awards Watch (Kassel, Diane Kruger, and the high-tech cemetery), Indiewire (Kassel and Guy Pearce), Salon (Kassel and Kruger), and The Hollywood Reporter (Kassel after the desecration).
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