The Shrouds review: David Cronenberg won't look away from lost love

I’ve experienced a rare thing with regards to David Cronenberg’s latest film, The Shrouds, particularly during festival time. As it’s a Canadian film, one of several that premiered this year in Cannes, I got to screen it a few days before flying to France. I’ve thus had a couple weeks to let its bones settle, to be able to look at it not with the instantaneity usually required to evaluate, as per our métier, but with the ability to allow its images and ideas to linger before fully reacting.

It’s no small irony that this notion of allowing what has passed to both settle and to be the subject of reflection is central to the conceit of The Shrouds. For those expecting a full-on return to the radical messiness of Rabid, the pulp perfection of The Fly, the raunchy seduction of Crash, or even the sordid yet sublime character studies like History Of Violence and Eastern Promises, they may be disappointed. His last film, Crimes Of The Future, was a return to his “red” period, reemphasizing the themes and palette that characterized many of his earlier movies. The likes of Maps To The Stars and Cosmopolis are part of his “blue” period—colder, even more intellectual, even more emotionally distant and formalist, more reflective than reactive. The Shrouds is definitely blue.

Since Crimes Of The Future was a dusted-off earlier script, it’s easy to see how it more fitfully conforms to an earlier aesthetic, regardless of whether its conceit worked for you. The Shrouds, meanwhile, is not only a newly written work, it has two unique aspects that help explain both its impact and some of its stylistic quirks: It is highly autobiographical, dealing overtly with the death of Cronenberg’s wife in 2017, and it was originally going to be a two-part show for Netflix, only to be reclaimed and reconstructed for feature-length film.

The truncation isn’t overt, but it’s clear there are more elements packed in here than may be first apprehended, and other slightly underbaked tangents that could have benefited from the larger canvas of a multi-episode journey. The Shrouds is the story of Karsh (Vincent Cassel, coiffed in Cronenberg’s slicked-back gray hairstyle), a businessman who runs a restaurant and a high-tech interment facility, GraveTech, where the surrounding grounds are occupied by a series of tombstones that have video screens embedded in the stones. Each marker is wired for connection through a secure app, allowing authorized users to witness their loved ones as they decay six feet under either on the tombstone itself, or on their mobile devices at their leisure.

This is accomplished in part by the technology that gives the film its title, a Turin-like covering of gray, future-fashion material that serves as a kind of enrobed MRI, presenting both on the app and the stones themselves a fully realized, real-time look at the bodies as they rot.

It’s a redolent metaphor, unsurprising for the sly auteur. The widescreen image and voyeuristic espying of the act of decay on a literal screen is a perfectly metaphoric match for a man whose cinematic output spans biographies of Freud to tales of sociopathic twin gynecologists to telepathic terror that literally leaves heads exploding.

When Karsh starts noticing anomalies on the bones of his late wife Becca’s corpse, he reaches out to his sister-in-law Terry to solicit some answers. Both Becca (in flashback) and Terry are played by Diane Kruger, and while Cassel has been a welcome part of the Cronenberg troupe before, Kruger’s chilly yet engaging air perfectly inhabits this world. The same can not be said for the relatively thankless role that Guy Pearce is given, and his twitchy performance as the aggrieved techie/ex-partner of Terry feels the least dimensional of the leads.

Despite the opening discomfiting scene in a dentist’s office, where Karsh’s teeth cleaning takes on an ominousness that reminds of the torturous equipment in Dead Ringers, The Shrouds settles into an almost gentle mode of paranoia paired with grief. Terry and Karsh explore the meanings of these markers on Becca’s bones, so desperate to find a greater narrative to explain their loss rather than simply accepting the actualities of mortality.

It’s easy to read Karsh and Becca’s connection as a twist on a form of necrophilia, making the GraveTech images akin to the most morbid of slow-moving strip shows, where the final reveal is as unclothed as one could possibly be. We see how Becca’s own battles resulted in a ravaging of her body, losing limbs and cracking bones, so that in life she was transformed into something approaching monstrous. Yet in death, she rests peacefully. There’s only the calm of her unmoving, wide-mouth visage, resulting in a rictus that silently smiles bemusedly at the outside world from her entombment, freed from the quotidian need for meaning that plagues the living.

Cronenberg’s films always ask us to dig deeper, and The Shrouds is no exception. Should we read into Karsh’s moniker the famed Canadian portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh, who captured some of the world’s great leaders and artists and immortalized them in their prime? Or, as a friend and colleague posited, perhaps it’s a sly homophonic twist on Crash, Ballard’s psychosexual tale involving the erotic drive of death by automobile? Perhaps the allusions to Fat Pasha and United Bakers Dairy Restaurant, beloved midtown institutions in the film’s Toronto setting, are ways of further emphasizing Karsh’s commitment to the culture of his late wife, or maybe they’re simply the director’s way of ensuring he gets the best table by name-checking them in a Cannes competition film.

And yet, I saw in the toppled graves visions of Prague, where the stones of Jews from hundreds of years ago were purposely knocked over or repurposed as paving stones. I saw the need for finding succor in conspiracy and ignoring the cold fact of meaningless death particularly disturbing in this world of carefully siloed news, where falsehoods once considered fringe are now parroted by millions. There’s a direct line between dismissing the moon landing and believing Shoah was a sham, just as this film’s insistence on a Chinese conspiracy inevitably resonates for those that tried desperately to shift blame for a pandemic onto an entire people.

We use stories to make sense of the nonsensical. There’s nothing more powerful a motivator than the unsettling nature of grief to turn this search into something more sinister, grasping evermore violently at kernels of fact to try and make us more than just cogs in a cycle of life and death. And yet, what makes us human is this very quest for meaning—and what’s foundational to the Jewish culture that Karsh wraps himself in like a shroud is this millennia-old process of processing, of talmudically teasing out words about words, meanings about meanings.

This is the paradox at the heart of The Shrouds, whereby the process of uncovering meaning, of picking at the bones of our existence, is poisoned despite our certainty that, somehow, we actually have access to arcane answers that uncover greater secrets. The closer one looks, the more one finds. While there’s no better descriptor for the role of what we do as film critics, the same can be shown to be a cautionary tale, from Eve to Hamlet to the present day, where a little bit of knowledge without a whole lot of humility can lead to disastrous things.

My first reaction was that The Shrouds is an engaging if underwhelming addition to Cronenberg’s filmography. I still miss some of the gloss of his earlier works, and while I’m certain Douglas Koch’s lensing is exactly what the director requested, it’s still lacking in some of the cinematic sweep that we last saw from Peter Suschitzky in A Dangerous Method. Cassel and Kruger shine, but the rest of the performances feel either staid or over-the-top. Some of the story comes across as pretentious, and some of the pacing is disjointed and inelegant.

Yet, as I’ve let it sink in, or let it rot away in my brain if you’d like, The Shrouds’ richer aspects have been revealed. Maybe I’m trying too hard to find meaning, wrapping myself in knots, incapable of being humble enough to respect my initial belief that it was merely a minor chapter in an astonishing filmography. Yet my initial thoughts and my later ones can both be true. For even a minor Cronenberg film is, by any measure, a major work, one most certainly worth reflecting upon before dismissing too readily, or too eagerly. One needs to only look a bit deeper, and to be unafraid of what stares back from the dark.