TIFF24: The Shrouds

The Shrouds is a difficult film, even by David Cronenberg standards. But grief is a difficult topic and Cronenberg doesn’t process it in the way that a conventional filmmaker would. The result is a film that is as distancing as anything he’s ever made yet, paradoxically, one of his most moving works.

In The Shrouds, Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, a tech entrepreneur and virtual stand-in for Cronenberg. He dresses like Cronenberg, with stylish Saint Laurent suits and goggle-like sunglasses. He has sharp, slicked-back white hair, also like Cronenberg, and is going through a similar experience as Cronenberg is in real life.

Karsh has recently lost his wife, Becca (played by Diane Kruger). He processes this pain through his new technological venture, the Gravetech shroud, which covers the body of the deceased in a high-tech sheet that allows the bereaved to watch the decomposition of their loved one’s body in real time through an encrypted video feed. It’s morbid, strange, and more than a little realistic in that eerie way that you only get in Cronenberg films. The Shrouds ostensibly happens in our real world, but its arch presentation casts an uneasy pall over the proceedings. As a result, the movie defamiliarizes the process of death and forces us to look on this familiar, heart wrenching topic in a new and strange light.

The opening scene features Karsh on a blind date with a refined woman his age. Dining at the restaurant located next to the graveyard he operates—Cronenberg’s dark sense of humour is evident right from the get-go here—Karsh proceeds to show off his new shroud technology for his date as they walk alongside the high-tech gravestones. He asks her if she’d like to see his wife and she agrees, thinking that it’s a bit morbid, but sweet, assuming that the LCD screen on the gravestone is a more advanced version of the portraits left on gravestones in many countries around the world, like an electronic picture frame. But no, Karsh means his dead wife in her present state, and so when he turns on the screen, we see the decaying bones of his wife, and so does the woman. She winces, withdraws, thanks Karsh for the lunch, and ultimately flees.

The whole sequence is like a twisted riff on the typical widower scene in romcoms, where a sad, gentle man shows a picture of his dead love to his new romantic interest, paving the way for a new relationship by paying homage to the old. But it’s also moving to listen to Karsh speak with such affection for the corpse of his wife, talking about how watching the video feed is the closest thing he could do to jumping in the coffin with her and experiencing oblivion alongside her. The scene epitomizes the film that follows, as it is bizarre, yet all-too human in its emotional obsessions—a description that would fit many Cronenberg films.

Cronenberg lost his own wife of 38 years, Carolyn Zeifman, in 2017 and returned to filmmaking in the aftermath, unable to stay at home and feel comfortable in his semi-retirement without her presence in his life. That return to filmmaking gave us his remarkable Crimes of the Future in 2022, which reworked a script Cronenberg wrote in the mid-2000s (and named after his early second feature). Now The Shrouds allows Cronenberg to process his own discombobulation in the aftermath of his wife’s death. It’s a movie that is grasping at answers and coming up empty, since Cronenberg himself has no easy answers about death, aside from the depressing beliefs of an avowed materialist and atheist: she is gone and she is never coming back.

Viewers looking for a riveting plot won’t find it in The Shrouds. Early in the film, Karsh’s gravesite is desecrated and he investigates who did it with the help of his sister-in-law, Terry (also played by Diane Kruger), who happens to be his dead wife’s identical twin, and his ex-brother-in-law, the nerdish, nebbish Maury (Guy Pearce). He goes down conspiratorial rabbit holes to uncover the workings of Icelandic environmental activists, Russian gangsters, and Chinese tech developers. But will he find the answer he’s looking for?

Cronenberg is working in the same mode here as he was in A Dangerous Method and Cosmopolis. Conversations are confessions. There are massive exposition dumps, but the information communicated doesn’t seem to clarify the situation. Dialogue brings clarity as well as confusion. Cronenberg speaks through his avatar, Karsh, and we get discussions of grief and loss and how the dead body of a romantic partner is like an extension of one’s own physical body, making experiencing grief something like experiencing phantom limb syndrome. It’s a fitting companion to many of his latest films as it shares their intellectual curiosity and disinterest in conventions, but it also is a late-period bookend with The Brood, another film fuelled by Cronenberg’s own personal demons. But where The Brood is about a young man’s anger, The Shrouds is about an old man’s sadness. At its core, this is an elegy for a lost love and a macabre vision that reveals the romantic at Cronenberg’s core.

8 out of 10

The Shrouds (2024, Canada/France)

Written and directed by David Cronenberg; starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders, Jennifer Dale.

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