Back in 2022, maverick Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg returned from a nearly eight-year hiatus from directing—a period that included the passing of his wife Carolyn in 2017 (a detail that shall soon become relevant)–with the futuristic body horror drama Crimes of the Future. Although it was certainly good to have Cronenberg—for my money, one of the most endlessly fascinating and artistically significant screen artists of his or any other era—back at work, I have to confess that the result was a project that just didn’t quite work for me. Oh, it was certainly well-made and contained the kind of strong performances and bizarre imagery that viewers have come to expect from one of his films. However, for a director who had always endeavored to try new ideas and approaches in his work throughout his career, it was a film that felt as if he was rehashing ideas that he had already explored at length in his earlier efforts, almost as if he was just another one of the many filmmakers over the years (including his own son, Brandon) who was blatantly trying to follow in his footsteps. Although still worth watching to a certain extent—even second-tier Cronenberg is a lot more interesting than the top-tier work of most filmmakers—what one came away from it was the hope that he was merely shaking off the rust after years of inactivity by doing something familiar to him and that once he found his groove again, he would hopefully return to making the kind of audacious works that were synonymous with his name.
Now he has returned with his latest work, The Shrouds, and that hope has been met and then some with a film that will not only go down as one of the very best films of this year but deserves to ranked as one of the boldest, bravest and best works of his entire career. It finds him tackling the subject of grief—a feeling that most everyone will experience at some point but never in the same way as anyone else—in ways that fit in with the Cronenberg filmography as a while even as they touch upon feelings and emotions that many viewers will recognize to some degree or another from their own experiences with the subject. Although the film is undeniably strange, it is also an intensely moving work of surprising emotional power and, if that weren’t enough, it also somehow manages to be one of the funniest things that he has ever done, though the humor is obviously of an overtly mordant variety. At a time when cinema is increasingly become bogged down with anonymous product that hardly seems to have been touched by anything remotely resembling a human personality, this is the sort of one-of-a-kind personal work that can remind you of what cinema can accomplish in the hands of genuine artists.
Following the death of his beloved wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), following a painful bout with cancer five years ago, entrepreneur Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel) has taken his initial grief-stricken desire to jump into her grave as she was being buried into a somewhat more socially acceptable and profitable direction by creating GraveTech, a new form of interment that utilizes hi-tech burial shrouds equipped with many tiny 8K cameras that allow loved ones to look upon their corpses via screens installed on their headstones. Although he may seem like a slick opportunist on the surface, it soon becomes obvious that the loss of Becca is something that he has still not quite recovered from and indeed, all of the information above is presented to us as the small talk Karsh makes to his lunch date at a restaurant that is on the same site where Becca is buried. Not surprisingly, the date does not go especially well (especially when they visit Becca’s grave so he can demonstrate the technology) but it is becoming a viable option for a number of people and Karsh is involved in talks for a big deal with a Hungarian financier that would bring the technology into Budapest.
Before long, however, Karsh’s life is thrown into upheaval. One night, the cemetery is vandalized and mourners are no longer to access any of the shroud videos. While his ex-brother-in-law Maury (Guy Pearce), the tech guy that he initially employed before farming the work out to a Chinese company, tries to get things back online, Karsh, loath to involve the police and attract unwanted publicity, begins to investigate the attack. Could it merely be a random outburst of violence enacted by people who find the entire idea of GraveTech to be morally repugnant or is it merely a piece of a vast international conspiracy, possibly involving China and/or Russia, that hopes to use the technology for inexplicable but presumably sinister purposes? In either case, is there an explanation for the odd bumps that Karsh notices in imagery of Becca’s skull?
At the same time, Karsh’s personal life becomes just as complicated as his professional one, perhaps even more so. He begins a relationship with Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), a blind businesswomen who is the wife of the Hungarian with whom he is hoping to do business. Around this time, his continuing relationship with Becca’s twin sister, conspiracy theory fan Terry (Kruger again), takes a shift from the platonic to the physical, which adds an additional level of tension since she was once married to Maury, who clearly has not gotten over her. If all of that wasn’t enough, Karsh also finds himself having.a series of dreams abut Becca in which she leaves his sterile apartment in the middle of the night, each time returning missing another of the body parts that was infected with the cancer that killed her.
Between the basic description that I have offered above and Cronenberg’s reputation as one of the masters of presenting grotesque imagery onscreen—so much so that practically any film even vaguely touching on the concept of body horror is legally required to invoke the phrase “Cronenbergesque”—some of you might expect The Shrouds to be chock-full of grisly and unpalatable imagery throughout. Although there are a couple of cringe-inducing moments here and there, Cronenberg, as has been the case with most of his later films, has moved away from the visceral stuff without easing back on his ability to unnerve viewers through the presentation of his ideas in a cool and removed manner that resists the temptation to pass judgement on his characters or their actions.
Although the concept of GraveTech may be disturbing to many, Cronenberg recognizes how the idea could have a certain appeal to some people as a way of attempting to come to terms with the grief that they are undergoing, even if he doesn’t ultimately seem to endorse it—it doesn’t seem to have done much for Karsh’s psychological well-being. Here is the rare film about loss and the grieving process that, for all of its hi-tech accoutrements and conspiratorial leanings, that is bold enough to examine what people go through in piercing detail without trotting out unconvincing homilies in the end to try to send viewers out on a moments of unearned uplift. He also recognizes that while Karsh’s dream for GraveTech may seem strange and twisted to most people, there is a streak of romanticism to his obsession that cannot be denied. (Indeed, this may be the most willfully romantic film Cronenberg has made since The Fly.)
At the same time, while The Shrouds is undeniably a dark and chilly narrative throughout, the film is also undeniably quite funny in parts. While the process of moving on (or not) after the loss of a loved one is at its center, the film also works as a dryly hilarious observation of the inherent flaws in attempting to use technology as a way of handling the messiness of human emotions. This is perfectly encapsulated in the great opening lunch date scene where Karsh gets so into explaining the GraveTech technology to his unwitting date that he never quite recognizes the fact that he is ensuring that a second date will not be happening. Karsh has also put much of his personal life in the hands of a virtual personal assistant dubbed Hunny (and voiced, not surprisingly, by Kruger) that proves to be less and less reliable as the story progresses. Cronenberg has always demonstrated a flair for wit in his films that has tended to get overlooked amidst the mind-bending concepts and gruesome visuals but this just might be the most amusing thing that he has done to date.
Cronenberg has also long shown himself to be as good at handling actors as any filmmaker working today and The Shrouds is no exception. The initial glimpses of Vincent Cassel might prove to be a bit disconcerting for some viewers since he has clearly been made up to look like the near-spitting image of Cronenberg himself—doing a pretty fair approximation of his voice to boot—but after a few minutes, we no longer notice that because his performance is so absorbing in the way that he manages to convey both the serious and the dryly amusing aspects of the screenplay. Wisely choosing to underplay his part in a way that makes even the most outrageous moments seem like matter-of-fact occurrences, he not only manages to make you believe that someone like Karsh would create something like GraveTech but that it might actually be beneficial. Kruger, on the other hand, has the film’s big juggling act with her three separate roles and while only one of them is “real” according to the dictates of the story (we only see Becca in Karsh’s dreams of her after her death), she gives each one a distinctive personality and voice that makes the multiple casting seem like more than just a gimmick. Although relegated to a smaller role, Pearce is quite weird and amusing as the tech guy whose emotional issues are perhaps even more pronounced than those of his boss—although recently celebrated for being the best thing in the largely awful The Brutalist, his work here beats that performance like the proverbial gong.
Recently, there have been suggestions in the media that The Shrouds might be Cronenberg’s last directorial effort and even if that doesn’t prove to be true, the fact that he is 82 years old pretty much means that he is in the final stretch of a career that is about as flawless as anyone working behind a camera today—even the very occasional misfires, like M. Butterfly or the aforementioned Crimes of the Future, tend to be fundamentally more ambitious and interesting than the finest accomplishments of most current filmmakers. (Call me crazy but I would take a mid-level—at least by his standards—work like Rabid over the entire schlockbuster filmography of Anthony and Joe Russo without a moment’s hesitation.) If this is his last hurrah as a filmmaker, I cannot think of a better way to go out than with a work like this that serves as brilliantly made encapsulation of the themes and concerns that have driven his work over the years. At the same time, rather than being a mere roll call of his greatest hits, it shows him to be an artist who, even at an advanced age, is still willing to challenge and provoke viewers in ways that will leave his fans, not to mention anyone who prefers their movies to be more adventurous than formulaic, eager to see what he comes up with next.