Got grief? David Cronenberg has an app for that in ‘The Shrouds.’
“The Shrouds” — 3 stars
We can expect a few constants from a David Cronenberg film.
The Canadian auteur’s more-than-50-year run of cinematic inquests into the grotesque anxieties of being human has yielded several signatures — gallows humor and squelching body horrors among them — that have earned him his own adjective. His latest “Cronenbergian” entry is “The Shrouds,” a cerebral thriller that certainly fits the morbid, bone-cracking bill.
But there’s also a specific, personal anguish driving this late-career offering that keeps its protagonist obsessing over love, death and the unknowable spaces between: Cronenberg’s second wife, film editor and director Carolyn Zeifman, died of an undisclosed illness in 2017 at the age of 66. The couple had been married nearly four decades.
Vincent Cassel (channeling the director’s mannerisms and bristle of white hair) is Karsh Relikh, a chic industrialist in a near-future Toronto still mourning the loss of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), from lymphoma four years earlier. His pain is so manifest in the flesh, his dentist says it’s rotting his teeth. So, as Karsh tells a half-horrified, half-turned-on blind date over lunch at a restaurant he owns, in a cemetery that he also owns, he engineered his own cutting-edge coping mechanism dubbed the “Shrouds”: 3D-camera-enabled tombs that allow users to watch, via high-def encrypted video, as the corpses of their loved ones slowly decompose six feet under.
It’s not for the faint of heart or stomach, but it brings Karsh some comfort — and sets the tone. “How dark are you willing to go?” he asks, inviting the woman to view his dead wife’s skeleton on the screen embedded in her gravestone, accessible on a handy app. She blanches. We can’t look away. Cronenberg is asking us the same question, filling Karsh’s world with familiar tech (his self-driving Tesla, his AI assistant, his “GraveTech” app that seems likely to be coming soon enough to your own smartphone) with a wink.
This semi-dystopian future might be fiction, but the emotions ring true. “The Shrouds” finds Cronenberg, 82, probing his wife’s loss with fascination, the camera his own shroud. Karsh shares the filmmaker’s atheism — searching for meaning, or maybe just relief, not in cinema but in science and sex. When Karsh confesses to wanting to crawl into Becca’s coffin with her at her funeral, his heartache feels achingly physical. “I lived in Becca’s body,” he muses. “It was the only place I really lived.”
Where he gets his mail, though, is a sleek Toronto high-rise that’s been redone after Becca’s death, a home that production designer Carol Spier has turned into a kind of catharsis architecture of its own — shoji screens, indoor koi pond — as if he’s trying to force a more serene Japanese outlook on impermanence by immersion. Another longtime Cronenberg collaborator, Oscar-winning composer Howard Shore, fills the synthy, droning score with texture and tension, while sumptuous cinematography by Douglas Koch (“Crimes of the Future”) infuses a melancholic sensuality into even the most macabre imagery, like the erotic dreams in which Becca visits Karsh, her naked body increasingly mutilated by the experimental treatments she underwent before death.
Cronenberg adds levity and intrigue with Becca’s prickly dog groomer twin sister, Terry (also played by Kruger); Terry’s IT wiz ex-husband, Maury (Guy Pearce); and Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the blind wife of a prospective Hungarian investor, who enters the picture with both business and pleasure in mind. All three agitate the conspiracy theories that abound when Karsh spots strange nodes growing on Becca’s bones, GraveTech is vandalized, and he fixates on figuring out who’s responsible.
Is it the Chinese government, or the Russians? The eco-activists protesting his global expansion into Iceland? Corporate espionage, or a secret cabal of sinister oncologists who may have implanted tracking devices in Becca’s body? The going gets goofy, the plot a bit capricious, and “The Shrouds” evokes familiar notes: a dose of “ExistenZ” techno-paranoia, a shot of “Crash” kink, a nod to Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” in Kruger’s fantastic triple turn — she also voices Hunny, the deceptively sunny Siri-like AI assistant Memojified in Becca’s image.
The film also suffers from erratic pacing and half-baked reveals, but at its best, it throbs with raw, human, horrific honesty. Though technology enables the shroud monitoring Becca’s earthly remains, the deeper Karsh sinks into it in search of solace, the more he’s haunted by the secrets his soulmate may have taken to the grave.
• • •
Rated R for sex, nudity and surgical wounds. 119 minutes.