PFS Springfest review: In ‘The Shrouds,’ David Cronenberg gets personal about grief
The director’s latest is part meditation on grief, and part conspiracy thriller.
When it comes to what inspired David Cronenberg’s latest film, The Shrouds, it doesn’t appear that there’s much mystery.
The director’s wife, Carolyn, passed away in 2017, and The Shrouds appears to be the work of a man still thinking about and processing the grief. And that would be the case even if the leading man, Vincent Cassel, weren’t given a distinctive white coif very much resembling that of the filmmaker.
The film, which showed at PFS Springfest over the weekend, opened in a handful of theaters last week and is set for a wider release this Friday, more than a year after its Cannes debut. It’s a successful film, one of the best of the 82-year-old Cronenberg’s very productive late-career period, although I was much more interested in the grief aspect of the film than the conspiracy thriller parts.
“Grief is rotting your teeth,” Cassel’s character Karsh is told by his dentist in the opening scene, four years after the passing of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger). The dentist soon sets him up on a date with a woman, which he holds at a restaurant he owns, near a cemetery that he co-owns, which happens to be where Becca is buried.
But it isn’t just any cemetery- it turns out Karsh is an entrepreneur who has created something called GraveTech, which allows grieving survivors to glimpse the bodies of their loved ones via monitors set up above the grave, as well as on apps they can access through various devices.
If someone brought you to their late spouse’s grave, even a standard one, on a first date, it likely wouldn’t result in a second. We indeed never see that woman again, although throughout the film Karsh’s personal life gets complicated, and not only due to his entanglement with a blind woman (Sandrine Holt) who is the wife of a potential client.
Kruger actually plays three characters- Becca’s sister Terry, as well as AI avatar named Hunny, and Becca herself, who appears in a series of scenes that are some type of flashback/nightmare.
These scenes are always set in a bedroom, and feature the dying wife returning from medical treatment, naked, sometimes with body parts missing, in keeping with Cronenberg’s long association with body horror. It’s a towering performance, one of the actress’ best ever.
Cronenberg loves to feature characters who are horny about unexpected things, whether it’s the car-accident enthusiasts in Crash, or Kristen Stewart’s surgery fixation in Cronenberg’s previous film Crimes of the Future. This time, Kruger’s Terry gets really, really hot for conspiracy theories.
Speaking of conspiracies, the other side of the plot consists of those high-tech shrouds, and strange things happening with them, including vandalism, hacking, and the possible involvement of bad actors, whether Russian, Chinese, or from some other part of the world. This plot is mostly represented by Maury (Guy Pearce) a computer wiz and weirdo who was formerly Karsh’s brother-in-law and seems unhealthy obsessed. It’s a dynamite turn from Pearce, almost a 180 from his Oscar-nominated turn in The Brutalist but still pretty outstanding.
I found myself less interested in the conspiracy plot, nor could I make heads or tails of it, although I suspect it’s more meant as background noise to the things Cronenberg wants to say about grief and our world of modern tech, than anything deeper than that.
The Shrouds was originally conceived as a series, although I’d say it works better as a film, one of the best at the festival and one of the most thought-provoking of the year so far.