Director – David Cronenberg – 2024 – Canada, France – Cert. 15 – 120m
*****
An entrepreneur who has created graveyard corpse-viewing technology to cope with his late wife’s death by cancer finds his inner world disrupted when his creation is vandalised and hacked – out in UK cinemas on Friday, July 4th
She (Diane Kruger from The 355, Simon Kinberg, 2022; Disorder, Alice Winocour, 2015; Inglorious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino, 2009; Joyeux Noel, Christian Carion, 2005; Troy, Wolfgang Petersen, 2004) lies dead on a slab suspended on air in an underground cave. He (Vincent Cassel from A Dangerous Method, 2011; Eastern Promises, 2007, both David Cronenberg; Default, Choi Kook-Hee, 2018; Trance, Danny Boyle, 2013; Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky, 2010; Mesrine, Jean-François Richet, 2008; La Haine, Matthieu Kassovitz, 1995) screams. He is Karsh, an entrepreneur who has set up the first in a projected series of high-tech cemeteries. Thanks to his proprietary technology GraveTech, clients can install the body of their loved one in a shroud, a wraparound artefact resembling clothing fitted with cameras which record images of the deceased’s decaying body in real time, accessible for viewing by the client whenever they wish.
We tour the facility with Karsh as he explains to an interested party how it works. It is a strange place, but then so is the country of the bereaved. How does one come to terms with the fact of a loved one no longer being there? Or being there in their body? Or their body being present while they themselves are absent? Whichever way the bereaved person looks at it, it makes little sense and is a hard situation with which the survivor of the loved one must come to terms. Particularly if, like director David Cronenberg and his central character Karsh, one is at once materialist and not religious.
Karsh has put his money where his mouth is, with Karsh’s late wife Becca buried in his cemetery, where he can view her decaying corpse via GraveTech at any time. There is a nod to Karsh’s late wife Becca being Jewish, but presumably this label is of a materialist nature and so implies cultural and ethnic rather than religious identity.
And then, the unthinkable. (Or, at least, the far more unthinkable than the realisation of the concept of Karsh’s GraveTech, which is already some way out there.) Several of the graves and their attendant technology, including that of Karsh’s wife, are vandalised. He learns of this atrocity through the employee who discovered it. That propels the piece away from an exploration of mourning and loss and into conspiracy thriller territory, the sort of filmic architecture that propelled Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983), although this is nothing like Videodrome. It does, however, likewise contain outside interests (think: Brian O’Blivion, Barry Convex) here reconceived as financially elite types who Karsh sees as potential GraveTech investors. Chief among these is a wealthy Budapest resident whose Korean-born wife Soo-min Szabo (Sandrine Holt from Better Call Saul, TV series, 2022; Once a Thief, John Woo, 1996; Black Robe, Bruce Beresford, 1993) negotiates with Karsh and suggests that her husband might well become an investor in Karsh’s proposed GraveTech Budapest. Before long, she and Karsh are sleeping together.
Karsh is played by Vincent Cassel, an actor almost two decades younger than Cronenberg, who these days as groomed and made-up here bears more than a passing facial resemblance to the director. This is not a quality one associates with writer-director Cronenberg’s protagonists: the nearest he has come to it previously is in Crash (1996), an adaptation of JG Ballard’s novel in which the protagonist is named James Ballard and played by James Spader, who looks nothing like the director then or now, although perhaps one might contend a resemblance to a younger Ballard. Perhaps Cronenberg’s protagonists have always been projections of his imagined self, but the visual resemblance has never been quite so striking as it is to Cassel.
Cronenberg’s films do, however, contain a long lineage of quasi-mad scientist types, and in this regard, Karsh joins a pantheon going through Vaughan in Crash, twin gynaecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle in Dead Ringers (1988), media personality Brian O’Blivion and shadowy businessman Barry Convex in Videodrome, Emil Hobbes who unleashes the parasite in Shivers (1975) all the way back to plague creator Antoine Rouge in Crimes of the Future (1970).
There are plenty of other echoes of the Cronenberg canon here: in the manner of Dead Ringers’ two male twins sexually involved with the same woman, Karsh is not only deeply and carnally in love with his late wife – or, at least, his late wife as she appears to him in his wet dreams, missing one breast – but also makes moves on his late wife’s surviving, identical twin sister Terry (Diane Kruger again) who has the same body, but with both breasts intact. However, in their congress, you feel Karsh is attempting to love not the sister, but his absent, late wife, for whom her sister is a substitute. His feelings towards Soo-min are somewhat more opaque.
Elsewhere, Karsh’s brother-in-law Maury Entrekin (Guy Pearce from The Brutalist, Brady Corbet, 2024; Prometheus, Ridley Scott, 2012; Memento, Christopher Nolan, 2000) is a tech wizard whose personal life is in the sort of complete mess that would make him the perfect fit for the socially disintegrating male protagonists at the end of Crash, Dead Ringers or Videodrome. Maury encrypted the Shrouds for Karsh, and it falls to him to rescue them when they are broken into by hackers who lock GraveTech’s legitimate users out.
And in a riff which feels new to Cronenberg, Karsh has an AI personal assistant named Hunny (voice: Kruger in a third role) on his PC and smartphone who usually looks like a young blonde, but occasionally morphs into a koala bear as a more cuddly avatar with the suggestion that her new flesh may indicate that she has been hacked, a possibility rendered more likely still when Hunny’s avatar changes again, this timer into an image of Becca with mastectomy scars visible.
Karsh is not wanting for money – his house has a custom-built, designer, Japanese feel to it, complete with indoor fishpond – and he embraces technology as an early adopter: as well as his AI avatar, he drives a Tesla. If the proceedings aren’t quite situated in the financially elite world of Cosmopolis (2012), they seem to hover constantly on its edges, given GraveTech’s wealthy client and investor base.
Perhaps the most apt Cronenberg comparison would be The Brood (1979), from the early Canadian FilmPlan days, when his work (mostly) slotted neatly into the body horror niche. That film contains a lot of material in it about an estranged couple, the writing of which came about through the director’s own experience of divorce. The Shrouds is similarly personal, although made by a much older man with a longer personal history and experience of relationships to draw on, including his bereavement from a greatly loved life partner. Cronenberg remains a unique artist, and his coming to terms with such experience is vastly different from anyone else’s take, yet if you can get on his wavelength, it remains deeply affecting. (I am all too aware, from long experience with my own and others’ reactions to Cronenberg’s films, both that I myself am attuned to his frequency even as many people simply can’t connect with where his head is at at all.)
Finally, a personal note: as a man currently undergoing treatment for stage one breast cancer – something of a medical rarity, it seems – I feel impossibly close to this movie. I felt that way before seeing it, and everything I felt was confirmed by the viewing process. Even though I am not deceased, and hope to be around for roughly the next quarter-century, I look at the image of a beautiful woman (which I am not) and see scars where breast tissue has been removed (just like my body, even though it’s male). On top of that, I am separated from a former life partner which, while not exactly bereavement, comes with not entirely dissimilar feelings of loss and a yearning for a former relationship that is no more. And around the time of the relationship break-up, I became bereaved of both my parents. Which means that, try as I might to be objective about this film, events in the last half-decade of my own personal life probably render it near impossible for me to do so. With that caveat, and bearing in mind that what Cronenberg does is clearly not for everybody, I thoroughly recommend The Shrouds as a serious, dark exploration of personal grief and loss.
The Shrouds is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, July 4th.
Trailer: