THE SHROUDS (2024)

An innovative businessman and grieving widower builds a device to connect with the dead inside a burial shroud.

by Lance Li 29th April 202529th April 2025 Leave a reply

The first thing that anybody who’s ever heard David Cronenberg’s name should know about The Shrouds is that it’s one of his tamest. Strictly speaking, it shouldn’t even count as “horror”: even the intended grimness doesn’t come off. Likewise, this latest from the 82-year-old who brought us The Brood (1979), The Fly (1986), and A History of Violence (2005), might better be the last thing for a casual moviegoer to see without the experience of his other works.

It isn’t unlikeable, exactly, nor boring to an excruciating degree; yet it managed to elicit so little reaction in me that I wonder if it’s the distance created by a grief-stricken man retreating into himself, keeping his feelings private, or just plain listlessness, an edge of “sensibility” dulled by all the soul-wrestling, emptied of marrow. In an interview for The Wrap, Cronenberg, who wrote the material for Netflix after losing his wife to an aggressive form of cancer in 2017, was insistent that the movie was not personal to him in any emotionally poignant way.

But did making “The Shrouds” prove cathartic in any way? Did he feel better after the movie was done? “No,” Cronenberg said, concisely. He said he’s asked the question a lot since the film premiered at Cannes last summer. And the answer is always the same. “Art is not therapy. If I had not made the movie, I would be feeling exactly the same way as I do now, in terms of my emotion, my attachment to my past and my wife,” Cronenberg explained.

Had he not tried to generalise his impotence under the banner of “art”, which also demeans the term, it would’ve seemed less desperate on his part. Forcing oneself to be moved or “affected” by artsy drabs is a special skill of the arthouse and festival audience, but sometimes in Cronenberg films there is enough going on at the surface to want to keep engaged, that is, before interest drains like a lead-acid battery. In Videodrome (1983), the story all but disappears under the ideas and metaphors on media manipulation that get piled up; in Crash (1996), there isn’t a narrative through-line to begin with. Imageries and set pieces carry with them the odour of having been reverse-engineered to “convey the point”, and that, I think, is about as far as his “art” goes. Such are the norms across the board in Cronenberg’s filmography, and I suppose you can’t blame him if he doesn’t see the appeal of putting your own feelings and emotions into perspective through film, if he has the same notion of an “idea” as a dense Continental “philosopher” who prides himself on his own density.

One’s constantly nagged by the impression that even Cronenberg himself isn’t sure exactly what he’s saying, the cogent, un-elliptical narrative notwithstanding. The whole conceit of a high-tech cemetery businessman, who offers customers the ability to view and navigate their loved ones’ dead bodies, growing paranoid after his cemetery has been raided and his wife’s grave stolen, is just a starting-off point for his usual indulgences. Death rots the flesh, grief rots the teeth, you had to literally see your wife’s decomposing cadaver to hold onto a piece of yourself left in her, but deep down, you know that the only refuge is between your wife-look-alike sister-in-law (Diane Kruger) and your blind client ‘From Budapest with Love’ (Sandrine Holt). Such an idea man he is. Such a work of doggerel you almost want to pity it.

Karsh can have his blind date visit his wife’s grave right after a meal, to witness in real time whatever’s left of her on the tombstone screen, and there wouldn’t be so much as an opening for the audience to break up, as the carcass of campiness breathes down our necks. Images, such as that of a nude silhouette of his wife Becca, with half an arm missing, standing at the door in Karsh’s dream, or of the client unexpectedly taking on the resemblance of Becca on her flight with Karsh to Budapest, don’t grow out of the initial shock, because attachment or involvement is the last thing on the movie’s mind.

Cronenberg has been the “conceptual” filmmaker he is probably for a reason: his dramatic instinct, crucial for themes to emerge and develop rather than be presented, is at best derivatively effective, as in The Fly and Eastern Promises (2007), and usually comatose and lacklustre. It probably doesn’t bother him that the step from Seth Brundle’s jealousy to him getting himself in the pod to wow his girlfriend is thin and cheaply contrived, that this misshapen feature of the conception doesn’t seem to hold water with his intention for The Fly: the viewer can’t decide if Cronenberg is really sceptical of humans’ capacity and qualification for technology, when the first thought popping into their head was “If only that fly hadn’t” or “If only Seth hadn’t” so and so.

The most damning problem facing indie cinema now is just how dramatically dead every other film is, because filmmakers graduate knowing where to swing the camera, when to place the effects, what “ideas” to throw around, and their films could still feel as alive and lived-in as a walking stillborn reanimated by lightning. A Ryan Coogler or a Brady Corbet could benefit enormously from having someone else like a Justin Kuritzkes or an Aaron Sorkin write their materials, rather than being constantly distracted by the endless money matters and logistics, and having whatever potential dramaturgic clarity leaked out of the technical aspects that wear them down.

Carol Reed could never have made The Third Man (1949) without Graham Greene, nor David Lean without Noël Coward for Brief Encounter (1945), Orson Welles without Herman J. Mankiewicz for Citizen Kane (1941), Elia Kazan without Tennessee Williams for A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Ernst Lubitsch without Samson Raphaelson for Trouble in Paradise (1932) and The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Howard Hawks without William Faulkner for The Big Sleep (1946) and To Have and Have Not (1944), and without Ben Hecht for Scarface (1932) and His Girl Friday (1940), George Cukor without F. Scott Fitzgerald for The Women (1939), Charles Laughton without James Agee for The Night of the Hunter (1955)—all with a rich background in either literature or theatre, which if nothing else, trains a writer’s dramatic sense with a rigour that couldn’t be found anywhere else.

Cronenberg sees Vincent Cassel (A Dangerous Method) in the mirror—his physicality matches the man’s gauntness—so he coloured his hair a little greyer, based him in Toronto, gave him a Tesla, had him speak English, called himself Karsh, and cast him onto the bigger mirror that was the cinema screen, to play off his obsessions for him. But as you loiter around with this CEO of GraveTech, you feel that it could’ve been anyone in the role: there’s no resonance in how that role was written, not the grief, not the paranoia, not the corporeal desire. Nothing of Cassel’s shadings in his character roles are here in his leading role, and there’s nothing they could’ve been used for anyway, so he just acted on a sort of blanket; his lines feel colder than an unsociable eccentric’s number readings, even the occasional goofy self-parody feels peculiarly flat. Only Guy Pearce has some awkward charm to flaunt as a nerdy, tech-savvy ex-brother-in-law, whom Karsh asked for help with the graves’ tech systems.

Perhaps for being structured like a miniseries (as it was conceived), threads—from the whereabouts of Becca’s decaying corpse, and whatever unnatural abnormality Karsh noticed on it, to a blonde doll wife look-alike of an A.I. avatar (Diane Kruger) playing pranks on him, and a surreal plot of international espionage with the Chinese and the Russian—get picked up, dropped and pasted on the underside of a desk, thrown in again, leading nowhere discernible. The usual “who can you trust” affair, ending on the easy “not even yourself” finish.

FRANCE • CANADA | 2024 | 119 MINUTES | COLOUR | ENGLISH