The Shrouds
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes
Stars: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce
Writer/Director: David Cronenberg
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
Often — too often — art is born of pain. The resulting work can be difficult to look at, and everyone is welcome to turn away. But there’s no telling the artist to ignore their personal agony. It has to be expressed, like a cry…or a howl.
In The Shrouds, Canada’s most distinctive director, David Cronenberg (The Fly, The Dead Zone, A History of Violence) lets out a quiet, almost whispered, scream of anguish.
That scream echoes from 2017, when Cronenberg’s wife of 40 years, Carolyn, died following a long illness. For Cronenberg, who practically invented the body horror genre, her passing triggered an impulse to make a film that explored the psychology of loss, the permanence of separation — and, of course, the morbid, physical truth about death and decay.
Vincent Cassel (Black Swan, Westworld) stars as Karsh, a late middle-aged Canadian businessman who happens to own a ritzy restaurant that overlooks his passion project: a high-tech cemetery featuring headstones that are tricked out with video monitors. You might expect those screens to play videos featuring happy moments from the deceased’s lives, but then you’d be forgetting this is a David Cronenberg movie.
No, the screens are linked to futuristic shrouds wrapped around the departed below; shrouds that transmit real-time images of the loved ones’ bodies as they decompose.
We meet Karsh seated by a window at his restaurant, entertaining a woman for lunch. As he explains the nature of the necropolis below, she struggles to keep her jaw from hitting the white tablecloth. Karsh offers to give his date a close-up look at his new technology.
“How dark do you want to get?” he asks her. And she leaves, a bit wobbly.
Of course, at that moment Cronenberg is asking his audience the very same question. It’s his invitation to head for the exits before things get really weird, and you can’t blame anyone for taking his warning to heart.
Still, while The Shrouds inevitably wraps the viewer in a gauze of surreal melancholy, Cronenberg also delivers a first-rate technological thriller. Karsh — who, with his angular face and shock of graying hair, bears an uncanny resemblance to Cronenberg — surrounds himself with tech strategies aimed at easing his loneliness. Besides his shroud invention, he’s created an AI version of his late wife (voiced by Diane Kruger, who also appears in some mighty sexy, if occasionally disturbing, flashbacks) to organize his days and keep him company while driving.
When vandals desecrate the voyeuristic graveyard — toppling stones, cutting cables, and even beginning to dig some holes — Karsh enlists his trusted computer programmer (Guy Pearce, a recent Oscar nominee for The Brutalist) to help him figure out why anyone would do such a thing.
One clue: As he lovingly pores over electronic images of his late wife, Karsh notices odd little nodules on her bones; tumor-like growths that defy explanation.
He mentions the things to his late wife’s sister — also played by Kruger — who happens to be an incurable conspiracy theorist.
Could they, she suggests, be miniature tracking devices? Is it possible, she posits, that we have all had microdevices embedded in our bodies through our food or water or whatever? And maybe, just maybe, the graves were ransacked by operatives desperate to keep that truth from the world?
It all seems crazily far-fetched, but once we’ve accepted the premise that people are willing to check in every week on the progressive decomposition of their loved ones, anything is possible.
Beyond its morbid premise, The Shrouds is rich in dark humor and off-kilter thrills. Cassel is excellent as a man haunted by his loss — and somehow willing to remain so for the rest of his life. Kruger — unforgettable in Martin Scorsese’s Inglourious Basterds — tackles her three roles with gusto, particularly as Karsh’s quirky, impulsive sister-in-law, who seems to know all too well she is one unguarded glance away from becoming her sister’s emotional stand-in.
But mostly, The Shrouds stars its 81-year-old director, whose pain finds voice in a film that encapsulates, in the most personal way imaginable, his lifetime of marrying the humane and the horrific.
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