Be warned: this review contains spoilers.
Everyone’s favourite techno-corporeal freak is back and this time he’s looking death right in the face – both metaphorically and literally. David Cronenberg, father of the body horror subgenre and the acclaimed filmmaker behind taboo-breaking cult classics like Videodrome, Crash (not that one) and Dead Ringers has just released The Shrouds, and it’s his most personal work yet. He says:
I was writing this film while experiencing the grief of the loss of my wife, who died seven years ago. It was an exploration for me because it was not just a technical exercise, it was an emotional exercise.
His closeness to the story is evident right away as our central character, Karsh – played stiffly by Vincent Cassel – is the spitting image of Cronenberg. The story follows Karsh, who has recently buried his late wife in his very own high-tech cemetery, as he struggles to acclimatise to her death. In fact, it almost feels as though she isn’t gone at all thanks to Karsh’s invention – a futuristic burial shroud which allows the bereaved to view images of their loved ones livestreamed from their graves as they slowly decay.
After the cemetery is vandalised, Karsh and his sister-in-law, Terry – Diane Kruger, in one of three roles she plays in the film – find themselves drawn into a complex web of conspiracy and subterfuge. As they fall deeper into this paranoid fantasy, and become more and more seduced by conspiracy theories (literally) we’re afforded an insight into the desperate search for meaning that often accompanies great loss.
While the anxiety and loneliness of a recently widowed man is deftly explored in The Shrouds – we see Karsh go on a first date, form an almost-romantic bond with his AI assistant and have sex with multiple women – it’s the way in which Karsh’s dead wife is memorialised that leaves a lot to be desired. Much is made of the loss of her body, specifically for his pleasure, and multiple dream sequences show the late Becca naked and showing off her most recent amputation (in one particular scene Karsh laments the removal of her right breast because it was his favourite).
The obsession with Becca’s body extends to the fixation on her decomposition, with just the sight of her bones seemingly enough to quell the deepest pangs of her husband’s grief. It’s unclear what Karsh ever loved about his wife, beyond the physical. In fact, his monetisation of the GraveTech technology that he uses to keep vigil over her decaying remains suffuses the story, as Karsh seems primarily focused on the global expansion of his company, and not on the loss of Becca.
The women in the film also seem interchangeable in our protagonist’s eyes (Kruger playing three of them doesn’t help). Despite promising his wife, on her deathbed, not to get involved with her sister, Terry and Karsh do have sex, and do so while Terry gloats that her breasts are bigger than Becca’s were. It’s this kind of writing that ultimately stifles the most interesting elements of the story and instead amplifies tired and unrelatable attempts at transgression. The suggestion that amputation could be eroticised no longer has the radical pull it might have had in the 90s, and the inability of a man to let go of his life partner in the face of profound technological temptation seems like a much more rewarding thing to explore.
Perhaps the knowledge that the filmmaker has mined so much of his own experience of grief actually hampers the viewer’s ability to non-judgementally engage with the story. Without this information, The Shrouds might just feel like a characteristically unconventional look at those parts of the human experience which makes us the most uncomfortable – sex, bodies and social deviancy. Alongside the many interviews confirming that this is Cronenberg’s personal story with his real-life late wife, it feels callous and surprisingly lacking in vulnerability. This is certainly not the film one would expect upon hearing the director’s reasons for making it. By the time Karsh begins an affair with a blind woman, played by the sighted Sandrine Holt, it’s clear that this is not Cronenberg at his best.
It would have been exciting to see the auteur’s meditation on transgression, trust and moving boundaries in a world saturated with deepfakes and a new cyber experience of embodiment, but the humanity is strangely absent in this film. No die-hard fan would have expected anything other than a nihilistic treatment of the topic of grief, but in neglecting to portray women as complex, cerebral and wholly loved individuals, Cronenberg’s most personal film may just be his least accessible.