The Shrouds

dir: David Cronenberg

2024

There is much of The Shrouds that is not baffling. That the director recently lost his wife Carolyn, a (second) marriage that lasted over 40 years, and that it factors into this flick wouldn’t surprise anyone.

This is still a film by the guy whose movies and name are synonymous with the overused term “body horror”. He didn’t invent it but by all the eldritch gods he’s certainly profited from it over the decades.

What is, in truth, more horrible than what actually happens to human bodies when we die? And yet this film, or at least its premise, centres around the idea that there are people so unable to let go of their loved ones that they would pay top dollar to have them buried in a technological marvel of a shroud that allows them, whenever they feel like, to watch their loved one decomposing.

I mean, forgive me if I reach for a bucket, but that’s not something I can stomach or that appeals to me in any way shape or form. And yet it’s something I can understand. The film’s not suggesting that humanity in general craves such a connection to their dead loved ones. But it’s positing the powerful idea that not being able to let go of those we love makes us do some very strange things.

Grief is etc etc. And its vast awfulness or its minute and exquisite tediousness is different for everyone. In David Cronenberg what it conjured up was a desire to make a 10 episode Netflix series where Vincent Cassell, looking a lot like Cronenberg except without the trademark glasses, but with the same shock of silver hair, is completely unable to let go of his wife. And through the magic of technology he can ‘keep’ holding onto her, in his very twisted way, but there is such demand for similar connection from others that he can become a tech overlord of sorts.

Then there’s some stuff with hackers, the Russians, the Chinese (the terms are used nebulously but specifically, referring to off screen forces that we never see with our own eyes), and I can’t say what any of that means, because the people backing this ‘series’ saw what Cronenberg produced, presumably, then quickly said “fuck that, we’re pulling out”, and the series became a movie with an absurdly truncated ending. That’s probably not Cronenberg’s fault. They did the same to David Lynch when he was making Mulholland Drive way back in the day, and no-one that loved that film loved it any less because it was a truncated series re-worked into a standalone movie.

I think Lynch is a good touchstone not least of which because Lynch and Cronenberg are two directors whose surnames have become adjectives. So “Lynchian” is used to denote whenever someone makes some slow, weird looking shit that feels like you’re trapped in a nightmare, and “Cronenbergian” is used for “weird shit and bodies doing horrific stuff”.

With such reputations come expectations, and as such this flick is surprisingly conversational: 95 per cent of it is usually just two people talking in a room. After a visit to a dentist who tells him that grief is rotting his teeth, Karsh (Cassell) has lunch in his own restaurant (in the middle of his private techno cemetery) with a woman on a blind date, but she’s only there long enough to express her horror when she sees what he’s actually created in order to avoid moving on from his wife’s death.

Even then, because death is weird and makes people think and do strange things, he is convinced that there is something strange happening to his decomposing wife, beyond the strange things that the decomposition process naturally does. Is it because of the shroud technology he’s developed causing some strange post-death mutation, is it someone else doing something to her, is it something the doctor who was treating her before her death did or is doing now?

Someone attacks a number of graves at his cemetery, destroying the slabs above their graves and hijacking the connection to the 8K resolution live feeds (?) coming from their graves. And this happens just as he’s hoping to roll out the ‘service’ to other locations, like Iceland and Hungary, which would make him presumably even wealthier and make this ghoulish service available to even more demented mourning people.

This is the difference between “plot” and “story” right here. The “plot” is maybe it’s The Russians trying to hack his death network in order to spy on people, maybe it’s The Chinese, for their own nefarious reasons; maybe it’s an environmental group opposed to this odious endeavour; maybe it’s religious activists offended by this commodification of death; maybe’s it’s the often mentioned but never seen Doctor that was treating his wife before she died, maybe it’s Karsh’s former brother-in-law Maury (Guy Pearce) who has mental health issues and tech skills and a mountain of resentment on his back.

The story remains that grief makes or enables Karsh to do some very weird and what we would call unhealthy things. That when you lose someone to cancer in such a painful, prolonged way, your mind, not wanting to accept what they went through or that they’re gone, conjures up all sorts of nonsense bullshit that you almost believe because it’s a way of delaying the acceptance of the finality of it all.

The plot is not interesting, but I guess it would have mattered more as the premise was stretched out for another eight episodes, but as such here it’s just background noise, really. It doesn’t push that much along, or forward. The parts of the story that are moving in parallel, as in, Karsh finds himself able to have sex again, or at least want to, for the first time in four years, and then Cronenberg delights in showing us just how much Karsh can function (and how fit Cassell still is in his late 50s) are far more engaging.

Sex has never been off limits in Cronenberg’s flicks, or ever that straightforward, but I have to say how surprised I was to see an actual sex scene in a commercially released contemporary movie. By which I mean they don’t actually have sex – this isn’t a return to that brief time period in the late 90s – early 2000s where art house directors were putting actual sex scenes in their art house movies as if they’d re-invented the porno – but it’s not something you often see anymore.

Diane Kruger. She plays many roles in this film. She plays Karsh’s dead wife Becca; she also plays her sister Terry, and she also provides the voice for Karsh’s AI assistant Hunny, who may be significantly less than she appears. She is naked for much of the film. In some of those scenes she is not only naked, but, as per Karsh’s dreams, parts of her are being subtracted, arms amputated, breasts removed, florid scars left in their place, and even then he dreams of making love to her, even as she becomes more fragile.

There is much to be made of the words Karsh uses to describe his wife or lament her death – the body, her body has been taken away from him. It’s her body that he misses; not her smile or her presence or the love they shared – it’s the physical access to “the body”. In Terry of course there is a reflection of that body, so he can, eventually, avail himself of her (but only when he starts relating conspiracy theories in front of her, which are her jam, apparently), but it’s not the same thing, not the same body.

This only occurs, or can occur when he has fallen into a strange relationship with an even stranger (blind) woman side character Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), who is married to a dying billionaire who wants to avail himself of GraveTech’s technology in order to immortalise himself (as least one assumes that is the billionaire’s intention – we never hear him speak about this, only through his wife’s intentions). One wonders what other purpose such a set up could have, since the dead guy will be dead, and unable to see the feed of his own decomposition, and his wife, who’s blind, will never see it either.

For Karsh it represents the pinnacle of his business, because if he can get this done in Budapest, surely the world will follow, and all sorts of weird creepy people will pay a fortune in order to watch their loved ones dissolve.

Bleurgh. Anyway, look, call me muddled up and such, but I actually found the flick fairly interesting. It raises a heap, an absolute plethora of interesting ideas. It doesn’t do a lot with most of those ideas, but I still found it intriguing.

I in no way appreciate or accept the ending, because it’s just so berserk and nonsensical that all I can do is just accept that Cronenberg, with no more money for the other additional episodes, chose to wrap it up in the most absurd way he could think of (with the entire focus of the film shifting to where Karsh will eventually be buried, and next to whom, and why?), and it was so bluntly shocking and meaningless (Soo-Min, out of nowhere, sports the same amputations as Becca, so it seems like a dream but maybe not?), but it isn’t so appalling an ending that it ruins what came before.

This, for me, stands in direct contrast with his previous flick Crimes of the Future, which I’m now starting to think I was unfair to, a flick which I didn’t think worked for most of its length, yet which I thought was redeemed by a cracker of an ending. That flick, too, had an older actor standing in presumably for Cronenberg saying a bunch of stuff mostly just to another woman in the room or scene, usually a very attractive (but unlike this flick, not constantly naked) woman.

There is a “there” that he’s getting at, though, and the question is whether he’s doing it effectively or not. You can’t have a film by a director synonymous with body horror, who’s spent decades representing the natural and unnatural distortions of the flesh in order to elicit fear, dread, lust, desire, longing, disgust, repulsion, attraction and not think that he’s saying something.

If, in modern society, we’re mostly shielded from the realities of death, in fact we can be said to be in constant denial of it, what is he saying about a time when people, counterintuitively, would want something like this service? Would it be a further distortion through technology of our natural distaste towards death, or is technology pushing us ever closer to this level of cannibalism, of necrophilia, because of our inability to accept that we must lose in the end?

Ugh, yuck, sorry, that went too far. Anyway, it’s definitely not a great movie, but it’s an interesting one, and some nights that’s good enough for me.

7 times this whole premise is so fundamentally wrong and unholy out of 10

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“When my wife was being buried, I wanted to be in the box with her. I couldn’t imagine not being there.” – is that from the film, or from David Cronenberg himself? You decide - The Shrouds