6 hours ago
3
THE SHROUDS
★★★★
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.
Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger in The Shrouds.Credit: Sophie Giraud
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.
Understandably, his reluctance to let go is something of an obstacle to his parallel desire to find a new partner among the living. Still, there are several women in his life, among them the blind Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), who wants a plot in the cemetery for her dying husband, and Becca’s identical twin Terry (Kruger again) who works as a dog groomer.
Becca has yet another double in the form of a virtual assistant who pops up on Karsh’s phone, the creation of Terry’s perpetually unshaven ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce), a “schmuck” whose jittery manner counterpoints Karsh’s suavity: both men are in seemingly permanent mourning, even if the woman Maury loves isn’t literally dead.
Diane Kruger doubles up as the dead wife and sister-in-law of Vincent Cassel’s Karsh in The Shrouds.
The Shrouds began as a TV show Cronenberg pitched unsuccessfully to Netflix, and the plot is superficially complex, involving sexual jealousy, activist groups who favour cremation over burial, and the possibility of Karsh’s high-tech tombs being hacked by foreign spies. But much of this happens offscreen, leaving room for doubt over whether it’s really happening at all (Terry, we learn, finds conspiracy theories a turn-on).
Again typically for Cronenberg, The Shrouds isn’t exactly a thriller, still less a horror film. In the tradition of Luis Bunuel, it’s a work of charged yet calm surrealism, contemplating the mysteries of life and death with open eyes – in particular, the mystery of what it means to connect with another person, whether physically or from a distance.
In a sense, The Shrouds contains nothing to interpret or decode. The bodies here are bodies, not metaphors for something else, whether they’re living or dead, real or virtual. Nonetheless, this is a film designed to sit in the mind and have its effect gradually: days or weeks later, you may find yourself realising that your own world is nearer to Cronenberg’s than you’d guessed.
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