‘I want his rotting body in our cemetery…’
Having directed several horror classics in the shape of The Brood, Scanners and The Fly, before branching out into more esoteric fare with Crash, Eastern Promises and A History of Violence, David Cronenberg has earnt the right to do whatever the hell he wants. All the horror directors he came up with are almost universally inactive or dead, and so we should be thankful that Cronenberg is still making films at all. His last effort, 2022’s Crimes of the Future was packed with innovative imagery and futuristic concepts, but it failed to hold together as a cohesive whole. The Shrouds is a movie that is very much cut from the same cloth…
In a near future, Karsh (Vincent Cassel), an entrepreneur and widow, creates GraveTech, an electronic tombstone that enables the user to watch the progress of their loved one’s decay in real time. So far, so Cronenberg. The rest of the plot takes in numerous love scenes (mainly between Cassel and Diane Kruger – the latter of whom plays three separate characters), a medical conspiracy and quiet meditations on grief.
Written in response to death of Cronenberg’s wife of 43 years from cancer, The Shrouds has a solid central premise, but the Canadian auteur tries to pack too much in to the film’s two hour runtime. He loses control of the narrative in the same way that his protagonist loses his grip on reality. That being said, the idea of a tomb being controlled by an app feels unnervingly prescient, and even at 82, Cronenberg knows how to create a memorable aesthetic. Being able to call on Cassel, Kruger and also Guy Pearce (here playing a jealous but brilliant coder) ensures that even at its most bewildering, The Shrouds is always interesting.
If this is to be Cronenberg’s last film, it is fitting that he has bowed out on a project that remains true to the artistic principles upon which he has always operated – cinema as art – frustrating and challenging art sometimes, but art nevertheless.
