“Grief and loss” are common thematic fodder in modern movies, but David Cronenberg puts his distinctive stamp on it in The Shrouds (now streaming on The Criterion Channel and VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) – and we should expect nothing less. The master of body horror cinema lost his wife of 38 years, Carolyn Zeifman, to cancer in 2017, a topic he sure seems to be exploring in depth in this film. Wikipedia defines his work as “exploring visceral bodily transformation, infectious diseases, and the intertwining of the psychological, physical, and technological” (implication: there will inevitably be weird sexual kinks indulged), all of which is present here, with an intent more personal to Cronenberg than ever before. And that may be why The Shrouds, in its intensity and dark comedy, likely makes more sense to its maker than to its audience.
THE SHROUDS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Karsh Relikh. What a name. Should we Freud it, or just move on? Let’s move on, lest we be here for weeks. Karsh is played by Vincent Cassel, made up to be a dead ringer, pun intended, for Cronenberg himself. Now, pour one out for Karsh’s blind date, Myrna (Jennifer Dale) – he takes her to dinner at the restaurant he owns, in a cemetery he partly owns. A cemetery where the plots are outfitted by Gravetech, a company he also owns. A company that wraps corpses in a high-tech fabric shroud allowing people to watch the bodies of their loved ones turn to dust in real time, in 8k uberdetail, on a monitor on the headstones or on their phones. Karsh shows off the tech to Myrna by giving her an eyeful of his dead wife’s decaying skin and bones. To be fair, he asked Myrna beforehand if she was willing to get a little dark, and she says she’s OK with dark. But her mannerisms soon tell us, well, maybe not this dark. And so this first date quickly feels like a last date.
You therefore won’t be surprised to hear that Karsh’s life is an odd, idiosyncratic one filled with subtly bizarre characters. His wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), turns up in flashbacks, frequently unclothed. Karsh is close to Becca’s twin, Terry (also Kruger, albeit bewigged), a perpetually overalled dog groomer who, we eventually learn, is sexually aroused by conspiratorial thinking, which really puts the “going down” and the “holes” into “going down rabbit holes.” (Hey, at least it’s not car wrecks, right?) Her obsessive stalkerish ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce) is Karsh’s IT guy, and a “catastrophically neurotic” disheveled slob. Maury helped design the Gravetech tech, as well as Karsh’s AI assistant, Hunny, voiced by Kruger, and animated to look like Kruger if she was playing M3GAN. Karsh also meets Soo-Min Szabo (Sandrine Holt), the wife of a Hungarian auto-parts magnate who wants to implement Gravetech in Budapest; she’s blind, and when she touches Karsh’s face to sense what he looks like, he responds in a manner suggesting a life of quiet desperation and loneliness.
Karsh’s interactions with these people get increasingly strange as he wrestles with What’s Going On With Becca’s Body – the shroud shows strange growths on her bones. Meanwhile, someone vandalised several of the gravesites, including Becca’s, and hacked the Gravetech software, rendering it unusable. It’s a whodunit that might have something to do with Icelandic ecologists or the Chinese government, maybe Russian hackers? (Whatever it is, Terry’s feeling it.) Karsh acknowledges that his work tends to stir strong feelings about politics, religion, tech and money, so there’s plenty of rabbit holes to step in and break your ankle. And where do Karsh’s emotional insecurities about Becca’s former lover/oncologist fit into this? We’re also privy to scenes that may be dreams or hallucinations or (ulp) flashbacks, in which Becca is increasingly scarred up and dismembered. Grief – it really does a number on people.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: In some ways, The Shrouds is a thematic culmination of ideas Cronenberg explored in Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers and Crash, but with the measured tone of his later work, like Eastern Promises and Crimes of the Future.
Performance Worth Watching: Take your pick: Pearce is sneakily funny playing against type; Cassel is a more-than-able veteran character actor who proves he’s deserving of more leading roles; Kruger keenly balances the raw emotion of Becca (nude, in pain) with Terry’s goofier qualities (birkenstocks, searching for meaning in strange places).
Memorable Dialogue: Terry bullseyes Karsh-slash-David-Cronenberg’s lifelong focus: “Tell me about this body thing. You’ve made a career out of bodies.”
Sex and Skin: Lots of it!
Our Take: Early in The Shrouds, Karsh explains how the idea behind Gravetech is rooted in the Jewish belief that the soul clings to the body after death and only lets go when it’s ready. Our relationship to grief is similar – although it never seems to let us go, grief being omnipresent whether we or not we choose to acknowledge it. Maybe a more accurate metaphor is that grief decays like bones and skin, slowly, silently and methodically, its residue never truly going away, as matter is neither created or destroyed. But nothing quite mirrors the experience of grief. Grief is just grief. And the more one ponders the nature of grief, the more inexplicable it becomes, the less things seem to fit together, much like Karsh’s (Cronenberg’s?) experience, and like the plot of this movie, which seems to exist to confound, offering no answers. I’m not sure there are even any coherent questions.
A key scene finds Harsh climbing into one of his own shrouds, as if such a level of technological penetration might give him deeper insight into his unquenchable inner pain. Or maybe he simply wishes himself dead – the gravesite next to Becca’s is earmarked for him, after all. Perhaps this is Cronenberg indicating that The Shrouds is purely an act of self-analysis via film direction, as it casts lines hither and yon into a variety of thematic territories, desperately in search of a sense of control or comprehension. Karsh is a physically well-kept man with a clean, Japanese-style minimalist apartment, but internally? He’s a mess, and the movie is about how some of that spills out and interacts with a confusing, chaotic world.
So of course The Shrouds is strange and challenging. All of Cronenberg’s films are. But this one is less overt in the Grand Guignolisms of his eye-poppingly gory earlier work, and sometimes more about the connection between psychological and physical pain. His tone is as stiff and cold as a popsicle, his dialogue odd and stilted, his sense of comedy absolutely sideways (a crazier movie might simply be conspiracy fetishist Terry hornyscrolling through her secret fave Reddit feeds). It’s far from an easy watch; it plods along gloomily, its characters are eccentric sort-of-caricatures and its plot points pile up like a mess of dirty laundry that nobody ever sorts. But the lingering sensation of Cronenberg-via-Karsh’s pain is hard to shake off.
Our Call: Late in his life and career, Cronenberg searches harder and deeper than ever. The Shrouds might end up being middle-tier in his robust filmography, but his work is consistently sticky and unlike anything else. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
