the shrouds
THE SHROUDS
Written & Directed by David Cronenberg
The godfather of body horror cinema and a true auteur: David Cronenberg is back with what is easily his most personal film. A darkly funny and twisted meditation on grief and the roles tech play in our lives.
Vincent Cassel (intensely French and strangely handsome) stars as Karsh, a tech entrepreneur and former "creator of industrial videos" (never explained LOL!). Karsh is the creator of GraveTech, a "tombstone that broadcasts a live, interactive 3D image of a deceased's decomposing corpse". The image is broadcast on an app using modified shrouds that envelop the body with tons of tiny cameras.
Karsh is also deep in mourning 4 years after his wife's death from cancer. He can't move on and is fixated on watching her shroud cam. If that sounds weird and creepy, well, that's because it is. Except the greatest trick Cronenberg and the film pull off is instead of off-putting, he creates a tone and general atmosphere of somewhat bemusement. Karsh never seems to react accordingly to the increasingly strange and sinister things happening around him.
A man almost numb from his emotional pain, early on we hear his dentist tell him verbatim "Grief is rotting your teeth". One day the GraveTech cemetery is vandalized, sending Karsh down an insane rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and fever dreams. He is haunted by visions of his dead wife (Diane Kruger) and also has a complicated relationship with her alive sister (also played Kruger). Wanna get weirder? He is also obsessed with his virtual AI assistant Honey who looks and sounds like, yup you guessed it his dead wife (also voiced by Kruger).
Don't be fooled by the conspiratorial plot turns the film takes. This is all about Karsh and the world he creats for himself amid the grief and tech dependency. Guy Pierce shows up for a few scenes as Karsh's former brother-in-law and once again proves why he's one of the best character actors we have (should've won the Oscar for The Brutalist).
THE SHROUDS is very weird, kinda sexy, definitely horny, and so darkly humorous amid the grief and sinister tech. Only a master like 81-year-old David Cronenberg could thread such tone and genres into this masterpiece. True auteur-driven independent cinema with a haunting gorgeous score by Howard Shore and partly funded by Yves Saint Laurent so Karsh is dripped from head to toe.
This all leads to an ending you don't see coming and left my jaw on the floor. I audibly exclaimed NO WAY as the end credits rolled. I want to see this one again. And if this does turn out to be Cronenberg's last film, what a way to go.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ out of 4
