Editor’s Note: Vanyaland film editor Nick Johnston is in Canada all week covering the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. And as usual, we wish we were up there with him! Check out our continuing TIFF 2024 coverage, read our official preview, and revisit our complete archives of prior editions.
If Crimes of the Future acted as red meat for mainline David Cronenberg fans – you know, the motherfuckers who do Rick and Morty bits while waiting for a midnight screening of The Fly — then the people who will likely be most entertained by his latest, The Shrouds, are those who favor the “milder” yet more cerebral version of the director. Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, Crash — this Cronenberg is the one that showed up to film Vincent Cassel (playing, essentially, Cronenberg himself) fuck the twin of his dead wife, a la mode Francais. It’s an extraordinary follow-up to something like Crimes, and it feels more out of tune with his recent filmography, which has occasionally drifted toward the didactic when cut by his acerbic wit. This is a very long and roundabout way to say that you might be caught off guard by how outright and knowingly funny The Shrouds is, and it’s one of Cronenberg’s most human works, if not “the saddest film [he’s] ever made” as outlined in the TIFF program. This is perhaps the difference that the TIFF blurb writer and I see in the film: I don’t see it as particularly maudlin – I see it as a deeply felt expression of grief, which encompasses more emotions than just “sad.”
After a brief flash of Cronenbergian madness – a dream sequence in which Karsh (Cassel) is trapped in some fleshy prison and forced to watch his scarred wife Becca (Diane Kruger) decompose through a gap in the wall, a giant lightning bug floating around her mouth before – we awaken with him into the film’s present. It’s essentially the world outside your window, with a few more high-tech virtual assistants and some shockingly well-developed start-ups floating about, one of which Karsh runs. See, he was formally a maker of “industrial videos,” but spurred by a realization he had while his wife was being lowered into the ground, he now owns and operates a company called Grave-Tech. The shrouds of the title refer to Grave-Tech’s most significant innovation in the funerary space: 3D-printed metal mesh wrappings that allow the bereaved to witness the decomposition of their loved one’s body in real time. In 8K resolution, no less. He parlayed that sensation of wanting to leap into the grave to be with her into a form of techno-capitalism, which is now spreading across the world. Pretty depressing to read, right? It would perhaps be if Cronenberg didn’t have his protagonist introduce his wares to us while also bombing on a blind date. His grief and estrangement from sex and relationships have essentially given him Travis Bickle reasoning, though not his sociopathy – it’s a hell of a thing to show a woman you’re trying to court your wife’s rotting bones, and exceptionally funny at that.
It’s during this moment that Karsh notices some weird growths on his wife’s skeleton – perhaps they were once polyps or something, or, as his sister-in-law Terry (Kruger) suggests, tracking devices implanted in her by the surgeons – and he begins to wonder about them. At least, he does until his cemetery is vandalized – video screens with spider-web smashes on turned-over headstones – and he enlists Terry’s ex-husband Maury (a hilarious and awkward Guy Pearce) to get to the bottom of what’s going on. Not only have the graves been vandalized, but their data is compromised, too – Karsh has been locked out of Becca’s grave by some unknown third party, and worse, the data is sealed and encrypted along with several other feeds of the interred. Theories begin to fly: Could it be Becca’s oncologist with whom she had a complex relationship? Perhaps the Russians want the data, especially before Grave-Tech enters the Hungarian market. Or maybe it’s the Chinese who have a stake in Grave-Tech and see it as the perfect way to spy on the Westerners once it inevitably becomes a popular form of clothing or something. It might just be that Karsh is losing his goddamned mind from grief. But whatever it is, it’s not good, and Karsh has to get to the bottom of it, if not to save his future, then to protect his plot – right next to Becca’s.
Cronenberg has spent the better part of the last decade in mourning himself – his frequent collaborator and partner Carolyn passed away in 2017 from a rare form of cancer, much like Becca does in the film – and has taken the time to work through and understand the oddity of his grief, as well as its complexity. Hence the varied emotional palette that he paints with here, as the elegy grows less straightforward in its anhedonia as time passes: the world still turns, the good memories co-exist with the pain and surface more frequently, and though one can never fully heal, they can appreciate, say, the flubbing of a first date or a random sexual encounter with a person who is turned on by conspiracy theories. And, for a filmmaker who lives and dies on the conceptual swerve, making a Hitchcock riff (albeit one with plenty of Cronenberg’s pet sounds) out of your mourning is perhaps the most and least apparent way to process your grief publicly. In context, I think Crimes is the film that the blurb-writer was talking about — an epochal declaration of the end of a form of man, one so thoroughly changed by the modern world that he requires a different form of sustenance to survive. The death of normalcy defines that film, with whatever hopefulness about the changing form of man smothered by a sensation of painful dread, much like one might feel when waking up three weeks after a funeral to discover an empty bed and a new reality that they exist in. The Shrouds, in form and tone, accurately depicts what happens when you live in that world for three or four years, where your reality might be slightly warped compared to what everyone else experiences but still vaguely exists in agreed-upon reality.
After all, this is Cronenberg’s first film in decades (probably since Dead Ringers!) set in his hometown of Toronto, and the film acknowledges as much. There are allusions to various locations around the city that the homegrown critics laughed at in the same way that I might laugh at a particular joke about the bathrooms at the Model, should Ted 3 ever grace screens. It’s a wink and a nod to a shared experience, existing even at the heart of a stylized drama, which makes his trademarks all the more oddly potent by their juxtaposition. If there is a source of mortal terror to be found in The Shrouds, it’s that the world goes on after we’ve crossed the epochal moment that will forever separate our emotional calendars into a specified version of B.C. and A.D. – but there isn’t much that anyone can do after that except try to find a way to live. Some will move on, others will try to and fail, and a few people will install mapping mesh inside of their wives’ graves so that they can track their decomposition in real-time. The healthiest, perhaps, do a variation of all three, and when paired with a sense of humor, it becomes a surprisingly vivacious depiction of healing and entanglement.