The Shrouds
Am I the only person who found parts of David Cronenberg’s THE SHROUDS (2024, Criterion) almost screamingly funny. I realize that this is a meditation on mourning inspired by the death of the director’s wife of 24 years. But there are also parts that border on comedy of manners about how we approach loss.
Vincent Cassell stars as Karsh, a businessman trying to cope with wife Diane Kruger’s death. He’s pioneered in a new high-tech cemetery in which bodies are wrapped in high-tech shrouds that allow mourners to find comfort in watching a video feed of their loved ones deteriorating. He’s doing well enough to be working on expansions to Iceland and Hungary. Then vandals or activists break in to tear up his wife’s and seven other graves, all containing patients treated by his wife’s oncologist, who was also her lover. This sends him off pursuing a variety of conspiracy theories. Are they environmental activists who believe the radioactive materials in his shrouds will leach into the soil? Or are they political activists concerned that the computer technology can be hacked to steal information from the mourners’ phones and computers? Or was the oncologist secretly implanting tracking devices on his patents’ skeletons to test them for some foreign power?
There are scenes that capture the essence of Cassell’s grief. He stares obsessively at the images of his wife’s rotting body and has even added new technology to allow for extreme closeups and rotated views. He flashes back to painful memories of his wife’s physical deterioration because of bone cancer so bad he couldn’t embrace her without causing a fracture. And, in line with Cronenberg’s fascination with body horror, we see Kruger’s naked body after a mastectomy and amputation.
But one can also cope with grief by finding some relief through laughter. The film opens with a dreamlike image of Cassell sobbing as he gazes at his dead wife’s naked body. He opens his mouth in a howl of grief, and the camera pulls back to show him in a dentist’s chair having his teeth cleaned. “Grief is rotting your teeth,” the dentist (Eric Weinthal) solemnly intones, and the discordant imagery and line reading made me start to chuckle. Then Cassell meets a woman (Jennifer Dale) for a blind date set up by the same dentist. Their fumbling conversation about his loss and her reaction when he shows her the shroud video seem like a witty comment on the different approaches people have to death, and Dale plays it all with perfect comic timing and brittle line readings. It’s also quite funny when Cassell seduces his sister-in-law (also Kruger), who’s aroused by conspiracy theories, and their conversation while going at it is ludicrous, even with Howard Shore’s ominous musical textures playing beneath it.
Yet this is also the Cronenberg who finds horror in the incursion of the technical on the physical. In flashbacks, Cassell’s ailing wife wears a collar that keeps her in constant touch with her medical team. His tech expert (Guy Pearce), who’s also the sister-in-law’s ex-, has given Cassell an AI assistant who speaks with Kruger’s voice and knows his affairs so well she can predict his needs. This technological invasion has very human roots. At one point, Cassell says he lived inside his wife’s body. Later, when Pearce admits to having used the AI assistant to control Cassell, he says, “I lived in his computer.”
Both sides of the film are fascinating, but they never quite come together. The high comedy plays almost as slowly as the mourning, which gives the film a lethargic feel. Maybe that was an attempt to merge the two, but it just makes the picture feel wrong. And when you’re thrust into a serious scene, it takes a moment to realize that suddenly we’re not supposed to be laughing any more. Without spoiling anything, I’ll also point out that there’s a big lurch into surrealism at the end that may leave you dumbfounded. It’s supposed to be hopeful, but the imagery calls back to one of the film’s most painful scenes. It’s all rather a mess, but at least it’s a mess that’s trying to be about something.