The Shrouds
by Hope Madden
Cronenberg’s gonna Cronenberg. Isn’t that why we love him? Whether it’s 1983’s Videodrome or 2022’sCrimes of the Future, Dead Ringers (1988) or A Dangerous Method (2011), 1996’s Crash, 1986’s The Fly, or his first feature, Shivers (1976), David Cronenberg is fascinated by the human body, sex, technology, and conspiracies in a way distinctly his own.
Even as you can kind of expect the expected in his latest, The Shrouds, the film is simultaneously more personal and less like a David Cronenberg movie than anything he’s made.
Vincent Cassel is Cronenberg’s stand in, Karsh Relikh, a man who, like Cronenberg, once made industrial videos but now creates opportunities for those who are interested to watch bodies rot. Karsh owns GraveTech, cemeteries with tech built into shrouds that wrap bodies. The shrouds contain micro xray cameras that allow mourners to see their loved ones—on a screen placed in the headstone, or conveniently on their phone.
It was Karsh’s overpowering grief after losing his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) that inspired the technology. But this being a Cronenberg film, the tech can’t be trusted.
Because Cassel is so clearly, right down to his hair style, playing Cronenberg’s avatar, it’s only fitting that Cronenberg plays with that idea. Hunny, an AI personal assistant programmed by Karsh’s former brother-in-law, Maury (Guy Pearce) even looks like Karsh’s late wife (also voiced by Kruger).
But is Hunny friend or foe? And does Maury have anything to do with the recent vandalism of the graves? Or is Becca’s sister (Kruger again) right in thinking it’s all a medical conspiracy?
The intrigue feels vaguely like Scanners or Videodrome, while the chilly sexuality pulls from the same preoccupations that fueled Crash. But Cronenberg leans more on dialogue and Douglas Koch’s precise cinematography to tell this story than any outright horror.
The Shrouds is not the kind of body horror usually associated with Cronenberg, but his corporeal obsession is more pronounced here than maybe any other film. Karsh is fixated on his wife’s body—the pieces lost during her struggle with cancer, its fate under the ground. It all feels like the filmmaker is asking us to accompany him on his own journey, not just through grief but through his reflection on his own preoccupations as a filmmaker.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t make for an especially compelling or exciting movie. The pace is slow, the performances stilted to match the dialog, and the resolution is nonexistent. The Shrouds has a grotesquely beautiful dreamlike quality, and it teems with notions both weird and fascinating. It just can’t pull that pull it all together into an entertaining whole.
