After losing his wife of 43 years, David Cronenberg turned the camera on grief itself

Los Angeles Times

16-04-2025

David Cronenberg never planned to become an adjective. But now that he is one, he's happy to claim it.
'Ever since 'Bergmanesque' and 'Felliniesque,' I think one has to aspire to becoming an adjective,' the 82-year-old Canadian filmmaker says dryly on a recent morning over Zoom from a book-lined office in his home in Toronto. 'That means there's a sensibility that perhaps didn't exist as a recognizable thing until you made it one with your films. So I accept that. I welcome it.'
For a long time, that Cronenbergian sensibility — intellectual but visceral, philosophical but perverse, driven by the belief that the human body is a kind of temple of doom — kept him on the margins of the mainstream. Over the course of nearly two dozen films spanning more than 50 years, from 'Videodrome' and 'The Fly' to 'Dead Ringers' and 'Crash' (not the Oscar-winning one — the one where gruesome car crashes are a sexual kink), Cronenberg has reshaped the horror genre into something colder, brainier and more disturbingly intimate: an arena of mutation, contagion and psychic rupture.
Once dismissed by some as a chilly provocateur, Cronenberg now looks more like a seer. In an age of body hacks and AI intimacy, the world has started to look — and feel — more Cronenbergian by the day. Coralie Fargeat's gruesome 'The Substance,' steeped in his brand of body horror, earned nominations for best picture and director this year.
But even as his aesthetic has seeped into the cultural bloodstream, Cronenberg's latest film, 'The Shrouds' (opening Friday in Los Angeles and New York), comes from somewhere far more personal. Written in the aftermath of his wife Carolyn's death in 2017 — at age 66 after 43 years of marriage — the film centers on a grieving tech entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) who invents a system that allows people to monitor the decaying corpses of their interred loved ones in real time. Diane Kruger plays three versions of the same woman, Karsh's wife, her sister and an AI companion modeled after her called Hunny, blurring the lines between memory and desire as the story spirals into paranoia, conspiracy and erotic obsession.
Cronenberg didn't think he would ever make another film after his wife's death. It was only after his longtime producer, Robert Lantos, encouraged him to return to work — first with 2022's 'Crimes of the Future' — that he realized he still had the focus and energy to keep going. And when it came time to think about what to do next, the answer was clear.
'It obviously had to be about my wife's death, in its fictionalized form,' he says. 'I started to go through in my mind things that I had felt. In the movie, Vincent Cassel's character says, 'I wanted to get into the box with her.' That was a really visceral feeling. And it was true.'
For Cronenberg, the grief of losing his wife, like so much psychic pain in his films, was rooted in the body. In mourning, he read Joan Didion's 'The Year of Magical Thinking,' her memoir about the death of her husband, and found himself alienated by what he saw as Didion's disembodied restraint.
'I read all the grief books and none of them matched exactly my grief,' he says. 'Didion barely mentions her husband's body at all. It's as though they never had sex and the loss of that didn't mean anything to her. It was all very intellectual. And I thought, well, that's not the way I feel. For me, it's really physical. Really physical, along with everything else.' (The first line of dialogue in 'The Shrouds' — 'Grief is rotting your teeth' — is quintessentially Cronenbergian.)
Kruger, who had never worked with Cronenberg before, says she was initially struck by how much more emotional and even touching the script felt than she expected from his recent work. It wasn't until they met in Paris to discuss the role that he told her the story had been inspired by the death of his wife.
'I was a little bit shocked because it became so clear to me that this film was, if not about him, obviously very personal to him,' Kruger said. 'We talked for hours and hours. You know, when you see pictures of him, he looks so cool and his films are so intense. So I just assumed that's what he would be like. And he's really not. I was very surprised by how open he was and how willing he was to share stories.'
Cronenberg is used to upending such expectations. 'After he saw 'Shivers,' Martin Scorsese said he was afraid to meet me,' Cronenberg remembers with a laugh, referring to his 1975 breakthrough, a low-budget shocker about a parasite that turns residents of a Montreal apartment complex into homicidal, sex-crazed zombies. 'I told him, 'You, the guy who made 'Taxi Driver,' were afraid to meet me? I was afraid to meet you!' We've become friends since then.' He grins. 'But yes — I'm a sweetheart.'
Though 'The Shrouds' deals with grief, loss and decay, it is also laced with macabre humor, including an early scene in which Karsh takes a blind date to view his wife's decomposing body. Cronenberg believes that tone was largely missed by the audience at Cannes, where the film premiered last year.
'All of my movies are funny, really,' he says. 'Because life is absurd. I guess I am a Darwinian, in that sense. I think we evolved to have humor in order to survive.'
Asked whether making 'The Shrouds' was in any way cathartic or therapeutic, however, he shakes his head.
'Art, to me, is not therapy — it's something else,' Cronenberg says. 'Even a somber movie, it's really playtime. You're in the sandbox. You're putting on funny mustaches and funny voices, playing people that you aren't. The creativity, the playfulness — that's life-affirming. But the pain and the grief is exactly the same as it was.'
That tension between anguish and absurdity runs throughout 'The Shrouds,' where technology becomes a conduit for grief and obsession. Like Cronenberg, a longtime automotive buff who raced cars in the 1980s, Karsh drives a Tesla, a character detail that now carries more baggage than he anticipated.
'One of the bad reviews said it was like a Tesla commercial,' said Cronenberg, noting that he is still as stung by negative reviews as ever. 'But when we made the movie, it was just a breakthrough car. Of course a guy like Karsh would be charmed by it. But now, yes, it feels very Musk-like, this idea that tech can fix everything, even grief.'
It's not just Tesla and Musk. As the political landscape has gotten weirder around him, Cronenberg has seen the contours of his cinematic universe bleed into other real-world figures as well, most notably Donald Trump, with his obsession with dominance and his theatrical, uncanny physical presence.
'Trump is a little less subtle than my characters,' Cronenberg says with a wry smile. 'Even the fact of his orange face — how can he not see what he is? Is he fooling people that he has a suntan? I don't get it.'
With 'The Shrouds' hitting theaters just as Trump leans into his fixation on annexing Cronenberg's native Canada, the filmmaker has wondered whether his prior criticisms of the president could cause him trouble during his American press tour. 'It's possible I'll be forbidden to come into the U.S. just because of something I've said,' he says. 'It's very heavy times when you have to think like that. Trump could be Putin, you know. He obviously idolizes him.'
If the world is starting to look more like a Cronenberg film, it may finally be starting to honor them as well. Cronenberg's own work has earned just a single Oscar, a makeup award for 1986's 'The Fly,' but last year's 'The Substance' — a deeply Cronenbergian exploration of beauty, identity and transformation — scored six nods.
Cronenberg regards the success of that film, along with Julia Ducournau's equally Cronenbergian 2021 film Palme d'Or winner 'Titane,' like a bemused godfather. 'I've met Coralie and Julia and they're like my surrogate daughters,' he says. 'It's very sweet. They've acknowledged the influence. It's not like it's a secret.'
Whether 'The Shrouds' will prove to be Cronenberg's final film remains uncertain. He originally pitched the story to Netflix as a streaming series, hoping the platform would offer him more creative freedom. But the experience, he says, felt disappointingly familiar.
'I was hoping Netflix would take more risks with interesting, edgy series,' he said. 'But it turns out they're hitting their subscriber limit, and they've become much more conservative as a result. My experience with them was much more like the old days with the studios than I thought.'
Even making 'The Shrouds' as a relatively low-budget feature wasn't easy. 'This film cost less than the catering on one of those Netflix shows,' he says. 'And even then, it was really tough to get it made. My son [Brandon] and my youngest daughter [Caitlin] are both filmmakers now, and they find it hard. In independent film, it's difficult to get the next movie made.'
Still, Cronenberg hasn't ruled out directing again. He just isn't counting on it. 'We all have some kind of arrogance,' he offers, thoughtfully. 'But I don't have that much. The world does not need my next movie.'
Asked if he feels any grief at the idea that 'The Shrouds,' a film about the crushing weight of loss, might be his last, he pauses.
'Well, yes and no,' he says. 'Even when I thought I might never make another movie, I never thought I'd stop being creative. I thought maybe I'd write another novel. There are many ways you can be creative.'
The real hesitation, he says, isn't about ideas but about stamina. 'Directing is physical and it really takes it out of you,' he says. 'You could certainly imagine a moment where you're halfway through a movie and you say, 'I actually can't do this anymore. I'm not focused enough to be good at it. I don't even know if I can survive today. '
'Then again,' he adds, 'there's Manoel de Oliveira, the Portuguese director who was still making films at 103.' He pauses. 'Now that is something to aspire to,' he says.
As in so much of Cronenberg's work, it ultimately comes down to the body. 'I'm not tempting fate — I will knock wood, even though it's not the cross,' he says, rapping his knuckles on the desk. 'I hope I'm healthy enough. I seem to be healthy enough. But you never know.'