Back in the main Cannes competition for the second time in two years, David Cronenberg delivers his most personal film yet in The Shrouds, with Vincent Cassel playing a thinly disguised version of the veteran Canadian cult director. First-hand experience of grief and loss are at the heart of this sombre thriller, though the 81-year-old Cronenberg naturally masks these autobiographical elements in layers of near-future dystopian sci-fi speculation and queasily erotic body horror.
Prior to his previous Cannes comeback with the uneven but widely praised Crimes of the Future (2022), Cronenberg spent almost a decade away from cinema, partly because he was caring for his wife Carolyn, who died of cancer in 2017. He has now channelled his grief into The Shrouds, which was initially planned as a multi-episode Netflix series.
After the streaming giant ultimately declined, Cronenberg honed the narrative down into a single two-hour feature. Which may explain why The Shrouds feels a little unruly and unfocussed, with too many loose threads and undernourished side plots. Even so, this is still an absorbingly weird autumnal statement from one of the most consistently original screen voices of his generation, still probing away at some familiar psychosexual obsessions, this time under a gathering cloud of looming mortality.
Marking his third collaboration with Cronenberg, but his first as leading man, Cassel borrows the director’s sleek white hair, poised mannerisms and tragic back story, He plays Karsh, the widowed boss of a Toronto-based company pioneering a macabre new kind of high-tech burial ground. Using digital wrap-around shrouds, motion-capture imaging and grave-mounted video screens, the company allows grieving clients to monitor the slow decay of their loved ones below ground. This long goodbye is presented as a consoling part of the grieving process, slowly severing the bonds of physical intimacy between living and dead.
Karsh has a lot on his mind. Despite being obsessively haunted by his late wife Becca (Diane Kruger), who is buried in one of his company’s digital shrouds, he is also cautiously looking to find love again. Unfortunately, his only close female friends are Becca’s eccentric, dog-loving, off-limits twin sister Terry (Kruger again) and Hunny, an annoyingly perky AI avatar who serves as his Siri-style online personal assistant.
Shaken out of his lonely, depressed trance by an act of unexplained vandalism at the burial ground, Karsh enlists his former brother-in-law Maury (Guy Pearce), a mentally fragile computer hacker, to help track down the culprits. Their quest quickly becomes a murky jumble of plots involving ecological protest groups, sinister medical experiments, and one of Becca’s mysterious former lovers, who later became her cancer doctor. Meanwhile, sexual tension grows between Karsh and Terry, who is conveniently aroused by conspiracy theories, a classic piece of wry Cronenbergian erotic pathology.
There is plenty wrong with The Shrouds, notably its low-voltage suspense levels, clunky plot mechanics and open-ended narrative. It frequently plays more like a talk-heavy chamber drama than techno-gothic thriller, with too much verbose exposition and not enough action. The final act is particularly confusing, with its vague hints of Russian and Chinese spy plots, unexplained bodies buried in the wrong graves, contrived family rifts and more. There are also teasing signposts to emerging subplots in Iceland and Hungary that never materialise, chiefly because they began life as chapters in the cancelled Netflix series. It seems strangely clumsy for Cronenberg not to trim them from the stand-alone film’s plot.
All the same, there is still much to savour here for indulgent fans of the Canadian avant-pulp maestro. Casting Cassel as his screen alter ego was certainly a smart move by Cronenberg. All sharp angles and haughty intensity, the French actor is a magnetic presence in The Shrouds, a living piece of human sculpture who brings much-needed kinetic energy to a dry script and muted thriller plot. The autobiographical parallels between Cronenberg and Karsh also inspire some heartfelt, moving reflections on grief, loss and enduring love.
Since this is a Cronenberg film, we also get lofty ruminations on burial rites in different cultures, a teasing subtext of antisemitic hate crime in the desecration of Jewish graves, subtle homages to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) in the lookalike love-triangle subplot, plus flashes of classic body horror. A handful of fever-dream sex scenes featuring bodies with mastectomy scars and amputated limbs are tender and lusty enough to annoy the kind of prissy killjoys who found Crash (1996) too disturbing. Which is a good thing, of course.
Craft and production design credits are also impeccable, from the radiant, fluid graphics that wash over the opening titles to Howard Shore’s brooding, electronics-heavy, Badalamenti-esque score. Cronenberg’s commendable bid to embrace the new digital mediascape of AI avatars and phone-cam footage is also sweet, albeit slightly clunky. The Shrouds is no masterpiece, but it throbs with the kind of quietly mesmerising psycho-sexual weirdness that no other director can replicate. Once again, even a minor Cronenberg movie contains more interesting ideas than most film-makers can muster at their best.
Director, screenwriter: David Cronenberg
Starring: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt
Cinematography: Douglas Koch
Editing: Christopher Donaldson
Music: Howard Shore
Producers: David Cronenberg, Saïd Ben Saïd, Martin Katz, Anthony Vaccarello
Production companies: Prospero Pictures (Canada), SBS International (France), Saint Laurent Productions (France)
World sales: SBS International
Venue: Cannes film festival (Competition)
In English
116 minutes
