At 82-years-old, David Cronenberg helms a sci-fi thriller about a shady organisation offering live streams directly from the grave, a high-minded head-scratcher starring a bewildered Vincent Cassel and multiples of Diane Kruger.
Over the past half-century, David Cronenberg has carved out a reputation for shocking, visceral stories in the genre of body horror. From The Fly (1987) to Crimes of The Future (2022), his penchant for the grotesque, for truly disturbing biological transformations, has become a calling card.Â
Yet, behind all the mutations is a filmmaker dead-set on pushing boundaries. He’s a true innovator whose latest film, The Shrouds, is only now hitting UK cinemas after debuting at Cannes last year. It marks the third collaboration of Cronenberg and Cassel after Easter Promises (2007) and A Dangerous Method (2011), a tech thriller that dares to make us squirm, though the ick factor isn’t quite as high as before.Â
Suffocated by grief, Karsh (Vincent Cassel) is the morose owner of GraveTech, a company that offers alternative burials by way of digital embalming so families can live stream their loved ones’ decaying corpses 24/7. Preserved in radioactive Shrouds, the new tech promises to hasten the grieving process, though Karsh, a customer in his own company, is unable to move on from the death of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger), whose skeleton is beamed to his phone and computer day and night.
He’s your classic grieving husband, a fragile husk complete with eerie visions and bedtime hauntings of Becca who, in trademark Cronenberg fashion, appears with missing limbs and angry stitches as a result of cancer treatment. She’s a visceral cue to Karsh’s obsession with death, a preoccupation that’s made worse when GraveTech is vandalized by an unknown group of hackers.
It’s at this point where our somber, intellectual expose of Karsh’s grief is switched out for a sci-fi whodunit. The deceleration from sombre character study to formulaic mystery is palpable, the core of which is compelling enough on paper – GraveTech is politically controversial, as is its invasion of the process of death – but in execution we’re apt to want the fretting Karsh to toughen up, buckle down, and get on with it.
In time, he does employ a modicum of agency by employing his shifty brother-in-law, Maury (Guy Pearce), to uncover the truth about the hackers. Echoing his sniffling, sickly Aldrich Killian from Iron Man 3, Pearce gives a quality performance that’s sadly nixed by an uneven script.
The significant casualties of this zoomed-out puzzle is the requisition of close-quarters, dialogue heavy segments, like Karsh’s blind date surrounded by Shrouds and his ‘will they, won’t they’ subplot with the mysterious Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt).
Her scenes are odd in the best way. Her billionaire husband wishes to fund GraveTech’s expansion and to be embalmed in one of Karsh’s Shrouds. Soo-Min facilitates the deal, giving rise to comedically sharp prods at the for-profit death care industry; cremation and burial are scrutinized under an Ai tech-obsessed microscope, the results of which are thematically stimulating sections that play with our convictions about what comes after life.Â
At the film’s final hour, we’re left wanting for some kind of resolution to Cronenberg’s lofty questions. His musings on death and our relationship to the bodies of our loved ones provoke an uneasy feeling, so The Shrouds is a success as a thematic exercise. As a piece of entertainment, we’re undernourished by a meal that promises protein in its characters, but burns through them as quickly as it introduces new ideas to unpack.
- The Shrouds screened at the Cannes film festival and is in UK cinemas from 4 July.
