In the earliest funerary customs, grave sites would be marked with a stone, or a whittled piece of wood, or, perhaps, a gigantic pyramid. We’ve long marked the spot where a dead body was buried, such that mourning can become a location-based task — one goes to where the body is to perform mourning and to do remembrance — but we’ve also long alternated between markers and architecture to denote a sacred site. Small markers are practical, sometimes carrying only simple inscriptions like family names and dates, if any inscription at all; but even the smallest can be marked with purposeful aesthetic adornment, perhaps with elaborate memento mori, perhaps just anything to mark it as human-made and made with care. Tombs, mausoleums, and church memorials literalize the grave as a human-made place, a home where the body may reside forever rather than just a note in the ground where they were felled. The gravestone, both marker and stele, is humanity’s compromise. And it’s honestly surprising that, given their omnipresence in architecture everywhere today, screens have not yet graced their facade.
Such a modern adornment does grace the monolithic gravestones in the world of David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, rendering the gravesite a multi-channel video installation of corpses thanks to these very expensive, laughably reverential iPads. The film stars Vincent Cassel as Karsh, which is a name that Ancestry.com claims is Yiddish for “cherry” but is otherwise mostly associated with an ancillary character in the video game Chrono Cross. This Karsh — his name enunciated with a rough gusto whenever it’s spoken — is in charge of high-tech funerary arrangements in the form of X-ray shrouds that can record and project the real-time decomposition of the corpse inside. He FaceTimes on his Tesla to work, dresses like a 2020s Yves Saint Laurent version of the characters in Mission Impossible II, and is mourning the loss of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger), who visits him in his dreams, on her gravestone screen, and as an AI Memoji assistant. Most of all, and he mentions this many times lest it’s not clear, Karsh misses his wife’s body, the “haptic feedback” as it were, and The Shrouds sees him searching for the ghost of this in all the wrong places.
Since this is a genuine Cronenberg movie, many of those weirder elements are played as banal points of this tech business, and banal elements are emphasized again and again to make them weird. As the plot kicks off, thanks to a mysterious vandalism incident only affecting a few choice graves at GraveTech, this horror-romance quickly turns into a politico-existential detective movie that simultaneously involves Russian agents, Chinese spies, and a possible affair from Becca’s past. Guy Pearce’s Maury supplies the paranoid conspiracy theories about international corporate espionage as he works as Karsh’s network security; that he’s also Karsh’s jealous and erratic ex-brother-in-law makes Karsh doubtful that this is entirely true. Most of The Shrouds’s pleasures come from this start-stop pacing of the plot that can trick the viewer into thinking the details of such a conspiracy matter, all before slowing things down for a surreal dream sequence or an emotionally exhausting conversation with a screen. There are two sex sequences here that must be some of the most disturbing in recent memory: one full of Cronenberg’s penchant for somatic shudders, the other a rough replacement for (or, perhaps, genuine act of) mourning. That the latter scene is darker than the former says everything about where Cronenberg’s artistic journey has led.
Most of the compositions in The Shrouds are literal and practical; the camera barely moves, and most of the film revolves around two-person conversations, sometimes delivered via FaceTime. That said, it’s anything but boring. If the camera stays still, it’s because the subject of the frame is either bizarre or, when held still long enough, made to be bizarre. Oftentimes that simply means watching someone watch a screen, such as when Karsh first shows a blind date the 3D, zoomable, rotating digital composition of his wife’s corpse, or when the dream version of his wife suddenly appears as a seductive Memoji.
Of course, it’s ridiculous to see a scarred, nude version of a cutesy avatar, and The Shrouds is full of plenty of these moments where it isn’t quite clear whether the appropriate reaction is laughter, a sense of classic Gothic unheimlich, or a deep sadness. Like the film’s daring mix of genres, these feelings often clash and complement each other in unexpected ways. Grief, too, demands complicated feelings, like missing verbal spats or finding macabre humor in a funeral that doesn’t go to plan. Cronenberg’s genius here lies in focusing in on those moments that would normally evoke a simple sadness and twisting them ever so slightly in the wrong direction, like he’s done to many a body throughout his work.
Becca’s last name, Relikh, makes an appearance only on her tombstone, at the time we’d be most likely to associate it with its homophone, “relic.” Perhaps it’s a grim ironic pun, but one that emphasizes the physical, architectural nature of the gravestone itself. The film emphasizes architecture, such as the modernist café in the middle of GraveTech’s sprawling Toronto yard or Kash’s Japanese-style high-rise apartment or the proposed landscaping designs of future international GraveTechs. One may scoff at Karsh’s insistence that he most misses his wife’s body, but since the dawn of time, people have all needed a bit of this architecture or something — anything — to mark the memory of those now dead, preferably where their body lies. As our screen-age tech engineers now know, humans need haptic feedback.
DIRECTOR: David Cronenberg; CAST: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Sandrine Holt; DISTRIBUTOR: Sideshow/Janus Films; IN THEATERS: April 18; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 59 min.
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