David Cronenberg’s cinema is one of corporeal corruption, mutation, and decay, and it’s the last of those that dominates The Shrouds, a multifaceted work from the Canadian master which playfully melds sorrow, intrigue, and comedy.
Arriving in U.S. theaters on April 18 after runs at last year’s Cannes, Toronto, and New York film festivals, the 82-year-old auteur’s latest is a story about death, grief, cinema, and sight, all of it concerning a mogul whose strange invention renders him—and those who pay for his service—a “corpse voyeur.” Mordantly, head-spinningly convoluted, it’s a unique take on the director’s favorite themes, laced with bleak wit and encased in an icy chill that’s fitting for a tale fixated on the grave.
“I get vertigo,” remarks Terry (Diane Kruger) midway through The Shrouds—a slyly funny reference to the Hitchcock classic with which it shares a fondness for doppelgangers and the psychosexual hang-ups they inspire.
Terry is a veterinarian-turned-dog groomer and the sister-in-law of Karsh (Vincent Cassel), the founder of GraveTech, who’s made a pretty penny with his bizarre brainchild: a high-tech shroud for the deceased that, along with screen-enabled cemetery tombstones and a smartphone app, allows the living to watch their interred loved ones decay in real-time. Karsh created his shroud as a way to cope with the loss of his wife Becca (also Kruger), who succumbed to cancer years earlier and whose skeleton he slowly witnesses waste away in a plot for two that he ultimately intends to share.
Karsh’s morbid viewfinder affords 8K 3D wide-angled and close-up looks at the dead, and though it gives him “comfort”—allowing him to feel as if he’s not separated from Becca—it creeps out a woman with whom he goes on a blind date as well as Terry, who’s the spitting image of his spouse.
The shrouds are a cutting-edge multimedia means of communing with the old flesh. The Shrouds’ portrait of the link between technology and humanity extends to Karsh’s reliance on an A.I. personal assistant named Hunny (voiced by Kruger) which presents itself as a cheery blonde female avatar who resembles Becca. As always, Cronenberg is fascinated by the twisted ways the organic and inorganic inform and warp each other, and that knottiness escalates at a rapid pace when, the morning after visiting the cemetery (which sits outside a restaurant dubbed “The Shrouds”), he receives a video of it being vandalized by unknown assailants.
This wreckage occurs at the same time that GraveTech is hacked, locking users out of their proprietary and encrypted shroud feeds. To determine who’s behind these dual attacks (and whether they’re related), Karsh turns to his brother-in-law Maury (Guy Pearce), who originally designed GraveTech’s systems.
Maury considers them brothers in misery because he’s still mourning his divorce from Terry, who considers him a wack job. With messy bangs and a scruffy beard, Maury hardly looks like the answer to Karsh’s problems, and in this case, appearances aren’t deceiving, as he proves incapable of undoing the hack. If this weren’t enough to worry about, Karsh is anxious about the weird nodules that, pre-vandalism, he noticed all over Becca’s skeleton—growths that Terry opines look like surveillance nodes.
The Shrouds sends Karsh further down the rabbit hole courtesy of his prospective business deal with a Hungarian electric-car pioneer who wants to help GraveTech expand into foreign markets. Karsh’s meetings with this titan’s blind wife Soo-Min Szabo (Sandrine Holt) lead to sex, while at night he’s engrossed by vivid dreams in which Becca calls on him in their bedroom, her nude body increasingly mutilated by cancer and attendant surgical procedures.
Making matters messier still, Karsh soon initiates an affair with Terry, this despite the fact that Maury feared their union above all else, and Becca reportedly said that it was the one thing she wanted her husband to avoid. Because this isn’t enough to keep him busy, Karsh also begins investigating Becca’s nodules, which he comes to believe might be the byproduct of Dr. Jerry Eckler (Steve Switzman), Becca’s former teacher, lover, and oncologist, whose colleague Dr. Rory Zhao (Jeff Yung) eventually factors into this craziness.
The Shrouds is awash in plot, and Cronenberg juggles his various narrative elements with devilish drollness, always offsetting his conspiratorial mystery with Karsh’s exasperated cluelessness and frustration. Theories abound as to the perpetrators of this intricate scheme, with the Chinese and Russians both pinned as prime suspects.
Nonetheless, the film cares little for concrete answers. Karsh’s chaotic stew of sorrow, horniness, fear, and paranoia is the material’s chief focus, and Cassel inhabits his protagonist with clinical self-awareness that’s complemented by his amusing confusion over who’s tormenting him, and why. Kruger, meanwhile, makes for a beguilingly obscure object of affection as Becca and Terry, not to mention Hunny, who at a certain point transforms herself into a koala bear (ostensibly on Maury’s suggestion) and, later, takes the shape of the scarred and amputated Becca that Karsh spoke with in his sleep.
From Karsh’s Japanese-inspired apartment (complete with a koi pond) to the recurring presence of canines—be it those which Terry cares for or Soo-Min’s service animal, which lies nearby as she and Karsh get it on—the film is full of suggestive details the director never allows to cohere into a lucid whole. The haziness is the point, as if Cronenberg were baiting viewers to intently watch (like Karsh and his customers do with their corpses) in the hope of attaining an elusive truth or, at least, a measure of comforting reassurance.
Grief, however, merely makes everyone and everything mad in The Shrouds, such that the more Karsh attempts to make sense of his circumstances—are GraveTech’s enemies interested in blackmail? Revenge? Or geopolitical espionage?—the more he finds himself staring down unreliable conjecture and his own tangled misery, need, and hunger.
Often as frosty as a mausoleum and yet energized by mordant humor—even an extended shot of an autonomous Tesla’s dashboard plays like a subtle joke about unsatisfying machines—The Shrouds makes no concessions to conventional coherence. Instead, it operates according to a free-floating dream logic in which the real and the unreal, the technological and the biological, are hopelessly intertwined—thereby giving this Cronenberg gem its distinctive and delirious DNA.
