“How dark are you willing to go?”
To quote Sufjan Stevens, we’re all gonna die. Many of us are going to be ill first, possibly for quite some time, and experience the breakdown of our bodies. Many of us will have to care for other people as they sicken. Some of us, if you’re a nurse or a paramedic or a doctor or a mortician, may care for people’s bodies every day. It’s annoying, being made out of meat. If you’re able-bodied and sighted, you probably go through your day in your head, mostly thinking of “me” as the person situated behind your eyes, seeing the world as an exterior thing that you experience and act upon. If you think about your body, it’s like, “I slept weird and my neck is sore”, or, “I’m thirsty”. You probably don’t think too much about it unless you’re exercising or having sex or something.
But if you’re not able-bodied, or if you get sick, or if your body’s death unexpectedly speeds up, then you become very aware of it. And if someone you love gets sick, or dies, and you have to think of them as a body, as meat, in addition to thinking of them as the person you love. It’s a strange thing, in my experience at least, this knowledge of meat and decay kind of sliding along next to my perception of the world. What I think of as normal, when really the other side of life is just as normal—and lasts longer! Unless something really weird goes down I’ll be dead far longer than I’ll be alive.
The Shrouds is Cronenberg’s latest attempt to deal with that.
I was fortunate enough to see The Shrouds last year, at the New York Film Festival last autumn, and I’m ecstatic to tell you that there are a couple of scenes here that made a room full of hardened film critics gasp in dismay.
If I counted correctly, The Shrouds is Cronenberg’s twenty-third film. He’s been defining and redefining whatever we mean by body horror since the 1970s, and this latest work, in some ways, is the most horrific yet, simply because it’s so grounded in ultimate reality. The Shrouds isn’t so much a movie as it is a sustained howl of grief. Main character Karsh (Vincent Cassell) is a widower who has little interest in moving on. He’s made death, especially his wife’s death, the center of his life. He’s dark and intense, and doesn’t care that people find him so. His immediate, matter-of-fact desire for his wife’s dental records is off-putting. The fact that he takes a date to look at his wife’s decaying corpse is—honestly? I don’t think there’s a word for that in English.
And yet isn’t this what grief is? When you lose someone you want to go out into the middle of traffic and scream that they’re gone until all the cars stop and everyone screams with you. You want it to be the top story on the news; you want it to be in everyone’s FYP. It’s unnatural that life can continue, that someone can just stop being there, and we’re all supposed to go about our day like that’s acceptable. That we’re all just going to stop being here, and people we currently love enough to die for them will wake up the next day into a world we’ll never see, and move on into a life we’ll know nothing about.
I think most of us know this—but we also know that we have to push a lot of that down into a backroom in our brains. We know that there’s nothing anyone can do. We know that we’ll just upset everyone by wanting to talk about it all the time.
The Shrouds gives us a character who doesn’t give a single fuck about any of that. Karsh doesn’t care if he makes people uncomfortable. He doesn’t care if he drives them away, or if he seems obsessive. Why should he change when they’re the ones who suck? He’s created GraveTech, i.e., “the Shrouds”, future tech somewhere between a reaper’s cloak and a cocoon, that can be wrapped around a corpse to allow a living person to watch their beloved’s decomposition. Once the body is in the Shroud, it provides a 24/7 livestream to a screen on the connected headstone, and you can look at it whenever you need to. Horrifying? Sure—but also a way to close an insurmountable distance, a way to keep your loved one present—even a way to see them continuing, in a way, as their body breaks down into other types of life.
Is it any weirder than burning a body to ash and keeping the ash in a jar on a shelf?
There seems to be enough of a market for them to warrant their own section in the cemetery that Karsh, a former industrial video maker, co-owns. He also co-owns the sleek, high-end restaurant inside the cemetery, because we’re in a Cronenberg movie. Everything feels just a little bit to the left of life here, in our reality. People can get very rich off industrial movies, and develop a sidehustle in final resting places. Digital assistants might be just about sentient. Governments fight with Indigenous and environmental groups about grave sites and whether to ban the Shrouds.
Everything to do with Karsh’s all-consuming grief, the insult of decomposition, sex that can really only be called “Cronenbergian”, and the Shrouds themselves, is perfect. And beyond perfect? Every time Cronenberg knits dream logic and body horror together so tightly that watching the film feels like being crushed in a vise… in a good way. (I really loved a lot of this movie.)
What didn’t work as well for me—and the aspect that seems to be highlighted in trailers for the film—are the nods toward a “vast conspiracy involving the Shrouds that might go all the way to the top.” Some of this plot works well in the moment, but it never feels as vital as the parts of the film that are just raw screams of GRIEF and DECAY and SEX HELPS ME FORGET/REMEMBER. The conspiracy ties into an intricate plot about the aforementioned digital personal assistant that was developed by Karsh’s former brother-in-law, which in turn leads into a bunch of conversations about AI, sentient tech, sentient people, what the hell is sentience anyway, and can you ever truly know or trust anyone, be they meat or machine, etc. etc.
But maybe that sounds too dismissive. I don’t mean it that way. Twists pile up, but I don’t think they matter. I think they might be there as a sort of increasingly involved meta joke, a distraction from the grief at the core of the movie that knows it’s a distraction, that Cronenberg keeps complicating to ludicrous degrees, to draw attention the very fact that it is a distraction.
What are our lives after all, but convoluted plots that distract us from the death that waits at the end?
The performances are all excellent. You have to nail a really specific tone to be a good Cronenberg lead, and unsurprisingly Vincent Cassel seems to have been born to play Karsh, fitting in perfectly in this icy, just-slightly-off world, delivering overwrought lines with a perfect deadpan twist that make them upsetting and really funny in the same breath. (Remember up above where I mentioned the gasps of dismay? I never said I gasped—I think this movie’s a laugh riot.) But he also digs into Karsh’s grief beautifully, wearing it in every moment, and making us feel it with him. And I’m ecstatic to be living in through a Guy Pearce renaissance. He plays Karsh’s (former, but still hanging around) brother-in-law Maury as a cringing nerd, the polar opposite of his turn as callow businessman Harrison Lee Van Buren in The Brutalist, but he made my skin crawl just as much in both roles. This is a compliment, believe me. Sandrine Holt takes a character that could have just been “international woman of mystery” and instead makes her a whole person that I honestly wanted more of by the end of the film. And most important for all this to work: Diane Kruger fully inhabits each of her three very different roles: Karsh’s late wife, Becca; her sister, Terry; and, inevitably, Hunny—the flirty digital personal assistant who might be turning sentient. Terry, a veterinarian-turned-dog-groomer, is spiky and conspiracy-addled. You can see where a lesser movie would turn her into a foil for Karsh, or make her wacky; Cronenberg respects her grief, too. And we come to know Becca through Karsh’s dreams of her, viscerally upsetting scenes that entangle eroticism, decay, surgery scars, pain, and regret into a mood that I’ve been trying to shake of for seven months.
Because that’s the thing, Cronenberg is one of the few filmmakers I can think of who creates film that feel like dreams. They make sense while you’re in them. They can be nauseating in one moment and searingly beautiful the next. You follow Karsh into the deepest recesses of his mind, and you understand everything he does even though a lot of it doesn’t make sense in our sunlit, waking world. Even that opening sequence, with the date—what if she’d been into it? What if she’d found Karsh’s wife’s decaying body just as entrancing as Karsh did? That would have been an easy, immediate way to find a kindred spirit, the way that you can know a person in a dream as soon as you meet them.
My one caveat with this film is that, unless this sounds like just the catharsis you’ve been looking for, maybe steer clear if you’ve recently lost someone close to you. The Shrouds is intense even by Cronenberg standards, but he’s given us a unique window into a universal experience that, in the end, feels like a gift.
