‘The Shrouds’ Review – David Cronenberg Plays His Greatest Hits [TIFF]

Audiences hungry for David Cronenberg’s infamous brand of body horror may have hoped that 2022’s Crimes of the Future marked his return to the genre. That film, which formed an unofficial trilogy that began with 1983’s Videodrome and continued in 1999’s eXistenZ, featured several callbacks to the Canadian director’s recurring visual and thematic interests.

The Shrouds, Cronenberg’s latest, is even less of a genre film than Crimes of the Future, though it does share its predecessor’s same dark sense of humour, as well as the director’s tendency to revisit or reconsider his previous work.

The film is ostensibly set in 2023, four years after the death of Karsh (Vincent Cassel)’s wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). Becca died of bone cancer and Karsh has yet to recover, as the opening scene of him crying during a visit to the dentist proves.

The introductory scenes also establish the film’s slippery slope approach to reality. The Shrouds is firmly set in the real world, albeit one where familiar technologies like self-driving cars and AI avatars are slightly more advanced. Cronenberg’s mise-en-scene, courtesy of cinematographer Douglas Koch, still looks like our every day world, but The Shrouds has a tendency for dreams to intersect with reality with little to no visual cues or transitions. Over time these become easier to spot, but the practice undermines our faith in Karsh’s experiences to the point that he’s nearly an unreliable protagonist.

In the years since Becca’s death, Karsh has worked with his brother Maury (a frumpy, squirrelly Guy Pearce) to develop his “empire”: death shrouds that envelop the dead before they are buried, as well as headstones with a video screen and corresponding app that allows families to monitor the decomposing bodies. This macabre sight can be upsetting, but it is just as often played for dark comedy. Early in the film, Karsh regales a blind date (Jennifer Dale) with exposition about his process before showing her a live 4K video of his dead wife’s rotting corpse in a scene that is equal parts grotesque and hilarious.

Cronenberg is on record that the film is heavily autobiographical. He lost his longtime wife of 38 years back in 2017 and Cassel is a dead ringer for the director – from the hair and costume, right down to the dry and slightly deadpan vocal inflection. The Shrouds is clearly a personal mediation on the director’s own struggles with grief and loss, but even beyond its ties to his lived experience, the film plays like a pastiche of Cronenberg’s prior work and interests.

First and foremost is the obsession with technology and the body, but also conspiracy and corporate espionage. In The Shrouds, the inciting incident is an act of vandalism at the gated Toronto location of Gravetech, Karsh’s company. Eight headstones have been attacked overnight and the hackers have disabled the video feeds, including Becca’s.

Considering the red tape involved in exhumation, Karsh elects to keep the incident quiet, relying on advice from invaluable employee Gray Foner (From’s Elizabeth Saunders) and tech expertise from his brother. Karsh’s investigation eventually reveals connections to Iceland, China, and Russia– suggesting that the graveyard attack may involve a protesting Icelandic environmental group, Russian hackers, or Chinese surveillance (or all of the above).

Considering The Shrouds’ tendency to conflate Karsh’ dreams of his dead wife with real life, it quickly becomes uncertain how much of what is happening is real vs conspiracy. Not helping matters is the fact that both Maury and Becca’s twin sister Terry (also Kruger, in an unflattering wig) are conspiracy theorists. When Karsh notices unusual bone growths on several of the bodies targeted by the vandals, there’s even a suspicion of medical experimentation. This is exacerbated when it is revealed that Becca’s doctor – and former boyfriend – Dr. Jerry Ekler (Steve Switzman) has gone missing…on a trip to Iceland.

The interweaving elements of conspiracy harken back to the corporate espionage and terrorist pre-occupations of Videodrome, eXistenZ, Crimes of the Future and other Cronenberg texts such as Naked Lunch. Alas there’s a reluctance by the writer/director to fully commit to examining these ideas: at times the conspiracy elements seem to exist purely to confuse or complicate the narrative. They lead the narrative in circles rather than break new ground, and the film’s abrupt ending will inevitably frustrate or disappoint audiences seeking closure.

There is some interesting commentary about how certain types of men may not always understand the world, but they can – and will – profit off of it.  Take, for instance, the tension surrounding foreign threats from China and Russia, as well as Karsh’s vaguely fetishistic appropriation of Japanese culture in his recently remodeled apartment. Both feel like Cronenberg’s sly and ironic observation about how straight men of a certain age move through the contemporary world. Adding fuel to the fire: Karsh has a self-driving Tesla and relies on the use of a Facebook Meta-esque AI avatar named Hunny (Kruger in her third role), who is both an assistant, a search engine, and an ego-stroking flirt.

These elements also play into the film’s conflation of death and sex. The Shrouds opens with Karsh’s unsuccessful attempt to rejoin the dating world after four years of celibacy. By the mid-way point of the film, he is courting not only Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the blind wife of a dying wealthy client, but also his (ex) sister-in-law, the near-identical doppelgänger of the woman whose death initiated his entire capitalist venture.

When Karsh and Terry finally go to bed in an extended sequence, she questions him mid-coitus about the bodies of her and her sister, comparing their anatomical parts and how her twin felt about them. It’s nearly identical to the line of questioning between Catherine and James in 1999’s Crash: an invocation of the dead or absent, in order to spice up the coupling, yes, but also a testament of how the dead live on in every day activities, regardless of the state of their physical decomposition.

These nuggets result in a film that is more interesting than enjoyable. At times The Shrouds feels oddly listless and uneven. This is exemplified by Cassel’s performance: while he is a solid stand-in for the director, much of his dialogue delivery feels leaden and repetitive, which is in keeping with many of Cronenberg’s films. The auteur tends to keep his audience at a(n emotional) distance, hence the oft-used terms “chilly” or “clinical” to describe his work. That’s applicable here, particularly when the film engages in philosophical discourse about life, death, and decay.

Still, the film pares well with so much of Cronenberg’s oeuvre. Even if The Shrouds moves the Canadian director a step away from body horror, it is clearly drawing from the same visual and thematic well as many of his previous films and the dark humour works exceedingly well. Overall, The Shrouds is a solid bet for Cronenberg enthusiasts.

The Shrouds had its North American premiere at TIFF 2024.