Writer and Director: David Cronenberg
At the age of 82, cult Canadian director is still making his unique brand of body horror films, modern-day Gothics that mix sex, shock and unease in equal measures. He always manages to draw A-list casts too, and here Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger and Guy Pearce do their best with an odd script and a convoluted story. Despite its themes of possession, espionage and heartbreak, this latest film by David Cronenberg is a little dull.
It begins well, however. Businessman Karsh (Cassel), whose “teeth are rotting with grief”, runs GraveTech, a cemetery with its own fancy restaurant overlooking the graveyard. Mounted inside the upright gravestones are screens in which families can watch the bodies of their dead loved ones decompose. Wrapped in shrouds, the hi-tech and possibly radioactive material creates an image of the corpse as the skin eventually peels away to reveal the bones we’re all made from. Karsh’s dead wife is in one of the plots, and he proudly shows a lunch date her decaying skeleton.
Karsh has plans to expand and have GraveTechs around the world, but when, one night, his cemetery is vandalised, he begins to believe that someone – or some country – is out to stop him. At the same time, the camera feed from his wife’s grave shows lumps on her bones. Are they growths from the cancer that killed her, or are they, as her sister Terry (Kruger) suggests, tracking devices that the medical team implanted when they were attempting to cure her?
Terry likes conspiracies – indeed, she is sexually aroused by them. Perhaps that is why she was initially drawn to her scruffy, twitchy ex-husband, Maury (Pearce), a computer nerd who looks like he has never seen the light of day. He helps Karsh try to figure out who is behind the physical and digital attack on GraveTech, tapping away on his keyboard as Karsh sleeps nearby on his futon in his Japanese-style apartment.
Kruger is required to be naked for much of the film, especially when she plays the role of Karsh’s wife in flashback. As he remembers her illness, there are flashes of Cronenberg’s Crash and even Peter Greenaway’s Zed and Two Noughts as sex is combined with depravity and yet until the crack of a hipbone, it’s all portrayed as everyday behaviour. The not-so-naked Cassel proclaims “wow!” at every opportunity.
The story, even for Cronenberg, becomes ever more improbable as Karsh and Maury variously suspect China, Russia, Hungary and Iceland as behind the hack. An AI assistant named Hunny (voiced by Kruger) goes rogue, while a mysterious blind woman (Sandrine Holt) and her guide dog come into Karsh’s life. The strangeness inadvertently becomes comical.
Cronenberg’s previous film, 2022’s Crimes of the Future, about performance art and technology, retained its intrigue and weirdness for its entirety. In comparison, The Shrouds unravels into too many strands, and then, by the conclusion, they are wrapped up together unsatisfyingly. While there’s no one else like him, this late film, inspired by own grief for his wife who died in 2017, is for Cronenberg completists only.
The Shrouds is in UK and Ireland cinemas 4 July.
