The Shrouds

Filmmaking veteran and icon David Cronenberg (Eastern Promises, Dead Ringers) has always been celebrated as a great visual director, he’s also a great writer too who is celebrated for his cerebral themes that can often come off cold as well. Often, he isn’t celebrated for his films in making pure emotion, sure his films are often always engaging, but you often left processing the ideas rather than feeling deep emotion to the characters. His latest film The Shrouds, carries on his sensibilities of body horror, dense themes, invites us into a compelling, rounded, and deeply personal narrative about a husband affected by the death of his wife. What makes the film so personal for Cronenberg is that is deals with grief, and a husband enduring the grief in which David Cronenberg lost his wife, Carolyn Zeifman of nearly 40 years back in 2017.

Karsh (Vincent Cassel), 50, is an innovative entrepreneur. Though he’s still going through the motions of mourning his late wife, he ends up using his capital and resources to invent a company called Grave Tech, a revolutionary and highly controversial technology that monitor’s corpses as the bodies decay in their shrouds with tiny x-ray cameras. Karsh even opens up a bar restaurant near the graveyards in case you want to get a meal before or after the visit. One-night, multiple graves, including Karh’s wife, are left damaged as Karsh continues to get threats. Karsh ends up investigating the perpetrators of the property damage and racketeering.

Courtesy Janus Films

Through flashbacks and dreams we see Karhs’s wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), and we see corpse decay through the dreams and while it plays off Cronenberg’s specialty of body horror, the anatomy in this film has never felt as vulnerable before as you feel a lot of remorse for Becca not only being dead, but seeing her body dissipate in Karsh’s dream state gives it some deep humanism. Karsh ends up hiring his brother-in-law and computer programmer, Maury (Guy Pearce), to trace down who is behind the vandalism. This opens up a rabbit hole of other companies in Russia and China attempting to steal information on Karsh’s technology he uses for the shrouds his competitors. As the narrative thickens, it’s realized that Karsh is very lonely due to his mourning. He ends up finding some solace after he encounters Soo-Min Szabo (Sardine), the blind wife of a wealthy businessman whose ailing husband is about to die. We also meet Becca’s sister and Maury’s ex-wife, Terry (Kruger again), who is addicted to conspiracy theories. Terry ends up seducing Karsh, and it only makes him yearn for Becca again and we begin to find out Terry had to put a restraining order on Maury due to his obsessive nature and refusing to stay separated from her.

The Shrouds has the richness of a sci-fi novel and offers very interesting characters. Cassel brings a lot of personal emotions to the role, building a multi-layered character that could have easily been lifeless, and his characters are given a lot of emotional resources channeled by Cronenberg’s own personal experiences after enduring such grief. While the scenes of Diane Kruger who appears sexual and nude for a large part of it could easily be dismissed as suffering from the “male gaze,” is elevated here due to the matureness in how its staged and delivered. As for Pearce, who was just nominated for The Brutalist–brings the right amount of paranoia and anxiety that feels natural across the board.

Courtesy Janus Films

It’s not perfect. The film has some loose ends where some of the plot points are fully satisfying and are left muddled, and while it ends up exploring the dynamic between Karsh and Maury that builds into the climax of the film that leaves the material feeling a bit uneven. But a movie this deep and unexpectedly emotionally resonant is another unique and impressive film in Cronenberg’s impressive oeuvre. This is a kind of film that helps us realize the current state and future state of technology and where we can be headed with it as time marches on.

THE SHROUDS IS NOW PLAYING IN LIMITED THEATERS AND OPENS WIDER on APRIL 25th