Review: The Shrouds – Digging deep
Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce
6.5/10
It’s no wonder there’s such an intense and authentic feeling of grief within (at least the first half of) The Shrouds. Writer-director David Cronenberg is one of the most highly revered horror filmmakers, even when he ventured out into different genres. With his 23rd directorial effort, Cronenberg claims this film is highly personal. His wife of nearly 40 years died in 2017, and he himself claimed, “I wanted to get in the coffin with my dead wife’s body.”
This particularly grotesque, yet also completely understandable mindset is explored in The Shrouds. The first half is a deeply felt musing on mortality and grief, especially in the way we use technology to explore it in confronting new ways. But unfortunately, the second half is an ungodly mess of story tangents, conspiracy theories, red herrings, and a general sense of carelessness.
Karsh (Vincent Cassel) runs quite the fascinating tech company—he’s created a burial system where you can view the decomposing body of the occupant through the various cameras on the shrouds covering them, giving the viewer a complete 360-degree view of the body in 8k resolution. He uses his own app to view his own dead wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). This appears to be a red flag for this widower as he tries re-entering the dating scene, but he’s mostly satiated by an AI girlfriend, Hunny (voiced by Kruger), though he uses her more as an assistant.
But things go awry when this unique grave site is vandalised, and Karsh enlists the help of the app’s tech guru, Maury (Guy Pearce), to track down the culprits. And there’s also a weird mark he notices on Becca’s body for him to investigate with the doctor that treated her. These wacky hijinks lead Karsh on quite the goose chase (seemingly involving international spies), but to what end?
Despite the very macabre subject matter, this is unusually not a horror movie from the horror maestro—there isn’t a single scary scene in this film. As Becca, Debra Winger appears naked throughout most of her performance, as she comes to Karsh in fantasies, deteriorating more and more each time due to the illness she suffered. It’s heartbreaking to see these reminiscences, as Karsh laments that he can no longer hug his wife, let alone have sex with her, without breaking one of her brittle bones—it’s certainly all rather horrific to witness, but it’s a non-horror way to see what’s (unfortunately) not an unrealistic examination of the human body rapidly heading towards death.
It initially seems that Cronenberg feels he has nothing to prove, with this 82-year-old director taking a far more muted approach than his earlier works like Scanners, The Fly, and Videodrome. No shock value here, just a gentle approach to digging deep into how we feel about the dearly departed and how long we must hold onto them before we let them go. But these very personal themes don’t seem to gel at all with the conspiracy themes that show up, which unfortunately take away from the pathos and leave what could’ve otherwise been a film with a tidier perspective on spousal grief and international espionage conspiracies.
DAVID MORGAN-BROWN