It makes sense that the protagonist of a David Cronenberg movie would take a first date to his wife's grave. That's exactly what tech entrepreneur Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel) does at the beginning of Cronenberg's The Shrouds, and it makes equal sense that he never sees that date again. Not that Karsh is in any shape for dating, since he's still fixated on his late wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), who's been dead for four years.
Karsh isn't just devoted to memories of Becca. In typical Cronenbergian fashion, he's invented a grotesque yet somehow popular device for observing the decay of Becca's body in real time. Karsh is the founder of GraveTech, which produces the titular shrouds, technologically advanced wrappings that transmit high-resolution images of corpses to little screens embedded in their headstones. Like the fleshy video-game consoles in eXistenZ or the writhing chair in Crimes of the Future, these are accessories that no sane human being would ever want to utilize, but in Cronenberg's twisted, surreal world, they're taken for granted.
Although The Shrouds is ostensibly set in present-day Toronto, it really occupies a sort of liminal space of waking nightmares, and like many Cronenberg movies, it operates primarily on dream logic, even when the plot initially seems straightforward. Karsh's cemetery is vandalized one night by mysterious attackers who knock over several of the graves and disable the connection that allows clients to view their loved ones' decomposing remains. As Karsh investigates this crime, he seemingly uncovers a global conspiracy to weaponize his technology to create a worldwide surveillance system, possibly by clandestine Russian or Chinese operatives.
Or maybe not. The conspiracy might be entirely made up, since Karsh's primary investigator is his unhinged hacker brother-in-law Maury (Guy Pearce), who was previously married to Becca's sister Terry (also Kruger) and harbors intense grudges against both her and Karsh. For her part, Terry is sexually aroused by conspiracy theories, which is a creative new kink from the filmmaker who brought car-accident fetishists to the screen in Crash.
There are numerous echoes of Cronenberg's past work in The Shrouds, and like 2022's Crimes of the Future, it represents a bracing return to the filmmaker's early themes of techno-human grotesquerie. At 82, Cronenberg seems rejuvenated as an artist. The Shrouds arose from his own grief after losing his wife in 2017. Cassel is deliberately styled to resemble Cronenberg himself, and at one point Terry admonishes him, "You've made a career out of bodies," which could easily sum up Cronenberg's own oeuvre.
Both The Shrouds and Karsh himself take an unconventional approach to grief, grounding it in physical sensation and tactile longing, and paying close attention to the way that human bodies break down both before and after death. Karsh's visions/dreams of Becca's long illness focus on her body being cut away, piece by piece, as doctors remove more and more flesh in an effort to stop the disease from spreading. It's horrifying but also tender, as Karsh reaches out for sexual gratification even while Becca's body becomes more and more fragile.
The haunting imagery, elliptical storytelling, and erotically repulsive sex/death themes are more satisfying than the increasingly laborious conspiracy storyline, although its incomprehensibility is part of the point. It gives Karsh something to blame for his all-consuming obsession, but it can also drag the movie down. Kruger's third role, as the voice of Karsh's AI assistant Hunny, is similarly shaky, although the janky CGI of her avatar adds to the movie's off-kilter feel.
That feel is what Cronenberg captures best, and The Shrouds sustains its unsettling mood from its cryptic beginning to its even more cryptic end. This probably shouldn't be anyone's first Cronenberg movie, but for viewers who have followed him across sicko classics like Shivers, The Brood and The Fly, it's a powerful jolt of the uncanny, horrific beauty that only he can create.
The Shrouds
Rated R
Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce
