In what might be his final film, David Cronenberg keeps it perverse
★★★★
MA, 120 mins
Going by recent reports, The Shrouds may be the last film from 82-year-old David Cronenberg, Canada's onetime king of 'body horror'. If so, it's an apt farewell – typically morbid, perverse and self-mocking, but also emotionally direct in the manner of some of his most durable classics, such as The Dead Zone and The Fly.
Vincent Cassel, who stars as an eccentric tech entrepreneur named Karsh, is a generation younger than Cronenberg but here bears an unmistakable resemblance to his director, with slicked-back white hair, a long bony face that lends itself to dramatic lighting, and the detached verve of a scientist who enjoys the process of dissection.
He also recalls some of Cronenberg's earlier eccentric leading men, such as Christopher Walken as a troubled psychic in The Dead Zone, especially when he's flashing a disconcerting grin. Like Walken, Cassel has a knack for throwing us off-balance through his speech rhythms, though in Cassel's case this is partly the consequence of being a native French speaker acting in English.
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Karsh, like Cronenberg, has 'made a career out of bodies,' in a very literal way. His ventures include a cemetery where the tombstones come equipped with screens, allowing you to log in and watch the corpse of your loved one rotting in real time. Naturally, there's an app for this, known as GraveTech (there's also a restaurant adjacent to the cemetery, encouraging visitors to make a day of it).
How many takers there would be for the scheme in real life is hard to say. But this is Cronenberg world, although we're nominally in something resembling present-day Toronto. In any case Karsh is his own most enthusiastic client, maintaining an ongoing relationship with the body of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) years after her early death from cancer.
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