One of world cinema’s most pungent brands, now in his seventh decade of filmmaking, David Cronenberg is beyond caring what we think of him, particularly if we decide, as many still do, to take him as merely a genre dynamo, the mad scientist inventor of “body horror.” (As if it hasn’t been over 40 years since the exploding heads of Scanners, and as if that reductive label by itself doesn’t obscure the man’s unique obsessions and the gnarly ways he’s metaphorized them from film to film.) Why should we be shy about calling him a visionary? Or, at the very least, the William S. Burroughs-meets-Francis Bacon of postwar film — he may be its Goya. Where’s his Lifetime Achievement Oscar? Cronenberg is 82 now, and while 2022’s Crimes of the Future was something like an autumnal homecoming parade, his new film, The Shrouds, is a personal testament, a hermetic and almost private wail, his own final-act version of a Goya-esque Black Painting. Even Cronenbergians may feel left out of its odiferous stew of ideas.
The Shrouds may be Cronenberg’s oddest film, because it is simultaneously farcical and heartbroken.
The essential context is that Cronenberg’s wife Carolyn died of cancer in 2017, after 43 years of marriage. Whatever questions you may have always circle back to her suffering and her absence, even if the intervening years have given Cronenberg plenty of range time for his peculiar style of analytic invention. What movie would you make?, you may ask, and it wouldn’t be this. The film’s premise creeps in during the worst first date in 21st-century moviedom: Karsh (Vincent Cassel, obviously cast and coiffed as a gaunt DC avatar) meets his unprepared lunch-mate at the restaurant adjoining the cemetery he owns, where his dead wife is interred, and where all the graves are part of a high-resolution 3D monitoring system he invented, so the bereaved can watch their loved ones’ bodies decompose in real time. (There’s even a smartphone app.) WTF, you think, who’d want to do that? But this is when and where the filmmaker has left the building: it’s not a metaphor for any slice of our sociocultural absurdity (though perhaps, comically, of our enslavement to screens and virtual documentation), it’s a metaphor for Cronenberg’s own longing, for his desire to close the abyss between himself and his wife, in whatever state she’s in.
Cronenberg’s all by himself; his entire oeuvre has treated illness and biopathology as metaphor, and his distinctive take on the human body’s sensual conundrums has always been saturated with both dread and worship. Now, all the body in question can do is rot. All we can do is what we’ve always done: watch. There’s real, intimate heat and need radiating out from this preposterous premise, essentially rewriting the proprieties of grief. Karsh’s blind date is a dead end, naturally, but he doesn’t care, particularly once he realizes that his wife’s skeleton, which he obsessively, lovingly keeps tabs on, like you might watch a nanny cam, is growing unusual nodules…
It is? Amid the many worried discussions about “her body,” Karsh’s liminal grief-life is further complicated by his flirty relationship with his sister-in-law Terry (Diane Kruger); repetitive dreams in which his naked wife (also Kruger) appears in various crucifying stages of illness and amputation, and drops clues about a mysterious project in Iceland; the sassy autonomy of his AI secretary-assistant (also Kruger); and an act of vandalism, in which his cemetery is all but ruined. Slowly, the sense of a larger and self-evidently ridiculous conspiracy forms, as Terry’s nebbishy ex-husband (Guy Pearce) tracks bizarre evidence for Karsh (Russians! Chinese!), the dead wife’s unseen doctor becomes a suspect, and Terry begins to get turned on by the skullduggery.
The Shrouds spirals, chattily, from there — it may be Cronenberg’s oddest film, because it is simultaneously farcical and heartbroken. The accumulation of odd evidence, mystery strands, and wayward theories that make up much of the narrative don’t add up to an act of storytelling; rather, they are another mode of Karsh’s grief, the internal logic of trying to make conspiracy-theory sense out of death’s senselessness. Which is clearly what the film itself is for Cronenberg — a bridge made of movie-stuff, built across an impossible chasm. That he knew it would fail to make the necessary connections, like Karsh’s cemetery “shroud” technology, doesn’t mean the experiment wasn’t worth conducting, and that the resulting artifact isn’t eloquent in and of itself. ❖
Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.