The Shrouds review: David Cronenberg's mordant, personal conspiracy thriller is one of director's best films
Director
:
David Cronenberg
Cert
:
16
Starring
:
Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders, Jennifer Dale, Eric Weinthal
Running Time
:
1 hr 59 mins
The Shrouds has taken an unusual journey to Irish cinemas. A work that is both typical of
David Cronenberg
and unlike anything he has ever made (a paradox that works through more than one of his films), this mordant conspiracy thriller arrived at the 2024 Cannes film festival two years after the almost parodically Cronenbergian
Crimes of the Future
.
Derived, like David Lynch's Mullholland Drive, from an ultimately cancelled TV series, the new film – a treatise on grief – was seen by many as a minor work. Who would not allow the director of The Fly, Dead Ringers and A History of Violence such indulgence?
The delay in distribution has been kind to The Shrouds. After washing around the brain for 14 months, it now feels a markedly superior work to the place-holding Crimes of the Future. There is an eerie stillness to the piece that says as much about loss as does the disturbing premise at its centre.
We first meet Karsh (
Vincent Cassell
) enjoying – if that is the word – a blind date in a hard-surfaced restaurant with an interested divorcee. Small talk leads to him explaining that his late wife, Becca, is buried just outside, in a cemetery wired up to his own appalling innovation.
READ MORE
'GraveTech' places a camera within the casket and relays images of the decaying loved one to a screen on the headstone or an app on the mourner's phone. Like all such tech-heads, he can't help enthusing about the specs. There is a 'high-res zoom'. The device allows 3D rotation. From what we gather, the feed is, thank heavens, not yet punctuated by commercials.
This could hardly be a more personal film for Cronenberg. He has explained that the recent death of his wife inspired the piece, and, with his slicked-back grey hair and precise diction, Cassell has something of the director's physical presence.
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Horror director David Cronenberg on his wife's death: 'I wanted to get into the coffin, to be with her body'
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]
As events wind on, a varied array of characters ooze in from stage left and add escalating complications to an already unsteady scenario. Karsh maintains a close friendship with Becca's sister (
Diane Kruger
appears as the live sibling and the dead one in troubling visions) while he copes with bugs in the system. An attack on the cemetery sets up parallels with persistent anti-Semitism. Karsh notices suspicious growths on his wife's decaying body. Hackers cause the GraveTech relays to break down.
Kersh's technology, though flawed and futile, meshes with thousands of years of human effort to process grief. One could read this as a Protestant appropriation of the Roman Catholic tendency to look the human remains right in the dead eye. The body is not laid out at a boisterous wake. It is studied calmly and coolly on a flat screen as worms eat their way through eye socket and frontal lobe. Very sober. Very grey.
Yet Kersh is always aware the process is a cod. 'I lived in Becca's body,' he says. 'It was the only place I lived.' An acknowledgment, common in Cronenberg's cinema, that this fleshy carapace is all we have.
Not everything works. If the great man will allow me, making an AI assistant of Kersh's late wife – a Siri or a Microsoft paper clip – feels like clunky, outdated satire in a film that otherwise relishes the oblique. Not everyone will be on board with the nebulous conspiracy theory.
But, considered as an exercise in hushed mortal contemplation, The Shrouds, sombrely scored by Howard Shore, earns a spot beside Cronenberg's best work. This is just the sort of unclassifiable oddity that the greatest directors, now less concerned with expectations, manage late into fecund careers.
The Shrouds is in cinemas from Friday, July 4th
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