Cronenberg’s critically derided work is a misunderstood if inscrutable piece about the nihilistic reassurance of death and mortality in a world careening towards rigor mortis.
Review #2,918
Dir. David Cronenberg
2024 | Canada | Drama, Sci-Fi, Mystery | 119min | 1.85:1 | English
R21 (passed clean) for sexual scene
Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders
Plot: Inconsolable since the death of his wife, Karsh, a prominent businessman, invents a revolutionary and controversial technology that enables the living to monitor their dear departed in their shrouds. One night, multiple graves, including that of Karsh’s wife, are desecrated, and he sets out to track down the perpetrators.
Awards: Nom. for Palme d’Or (Cannes)
International Sales: SBS International
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Slightly Mature – Death & Mortality; Technology & Morality; Sexuality
Narrative Style: Slightly Complex
Pace: Slightly Slow
Audience Type: Slightly Arthouse
Viewed: The Projector Cineleisure (as part of Singapore International Film Festival)
Spoilers: No
It’s funny how I want to revisit this film again, even though I wanted to leave it at times during the screening. Well, trust David Cronenberg to make me distrust myself.
Despite having seen thousands of films, I’ve yet to experience something like The Shrouds, though I don’t mean to suggest that it is an exceptional work but that you should give it a chance and ignore the bad reviews, which have been some of the director’s worst in his storied career.
Vincent Cassel is Karsh, who lost his wife years ago. Hoping to find peace, albeit morbidly, he exercises his entrepreneurial muscles by developing an innovative device that allows the grieving to see their deceased loved one inside a burial shroud—bones and all.
A Letterboxd user cheekily described the film as ‘boners and all’, which is also apt as Cronenberg characteristically explores sexual desire amid death, decay and even disability.
The Shrouds is rather overdrawn and unexpectedly talky; most of the time, the verbiage amounts to nothing significant as the characters converse in circles, make empty threats and promises, titillate each other with sexual advances, etc.
“It’s not meant for the living.”
It’s Cronenberg in inscrutable mode and half the time it doesn’t feel like the narrative is going to work, yet I can’t stop thinking about the film days after.
I reckon that it is the way The Shrouds lands at the end… that triggers and emits a haunting cocoon-like feeling of nihilistic reassurance in a world careening towards rigor mortis.
You see, throughout Cronenberg’s work, there is a strange, ‘faux’ undercurrent of a threat, be it techno-medical espionage, artificial intelligence, or simply, broad consequences of geopolitical posturing.
It is much like the neoliberal capitalist world we live in, only that the consequences are more perplexing and elusive—at least in theory, which is what I think Cronenberg is driving at. He’s sad and afraid of the future, of mortality, where death remains woefully exploited.
The Shrouds feels like an expansion of the term Cronenbergian, away from the corporeality of body horror that the director has been associated with all his life. As Deleuze would attest, this could be Cronenberg’s newfound ‘line of flight’ at the ripe old age of 81—and quite literally so in the final shot.
Grade: B
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 