David Cronenberg Takes High Tech to the Graveyard

The French Surrealist Jean Cocteau once said that the cinema was “death at work.” David Cronenberg’s gloriously morbid new movie, The Shrouds, 
concerns a filmmaker who takes his work home with him.

Karsh (Vincent Cassel) is not an auteur on par with Cocteau, or Cronenberg. He’s a self-described “producer of industrial videos,” who has poured his resources into an ambitious new startup venture called GraveTech. Like many of Cronenberg’s movies, The Shrouds is set in the director’s native Toronto, a distinctly nondescript metropolis that always seems to be receding before the camera; the company’s headquarters is tucked away at the edge of the city behind a wrought iron gate. GraveTech consists of a private cemetery with its own adjacent gourmet restaurant; the menu offers Baltimore-style crab cakes and grilled octopus. The walls are adorned with Karsh’s prize innovation: a series of specially designed winding sheets woven out of fiber-optic cables.

The shrouds are sleek and jet-black; they could be the robes of some sinister monastic order, or hovering, faceless horror-movie wraiths. A visitor who invokes the Shroud of Turin gets hand-waved away cheerfully. “It’s pretty definitely a fake,” Karsh says. “My shrouds are not fakes.” What he means is that they work: Form follows function. The shrouds’ intricate mesh contains miniature digital cameras that record footage of the bodies they are wrapped around. The video is then encrypted and broadcast in high definition to GraveTech users. Viewers have the option of watching a PowerPoint-style slideshow of their deceased loved ones’ bodies as they slowly decompose in real time, or of zooming directly into their skull cavities and other nooks and crannies. They can enlarge the frame, or tilt it, or rotate it 360 degrees. Presentation is everything. As the film opens, Karsh’s troubleshooters are trying to upscale to 8K.

Karsh isn’t just the CEO of GraveTech; he’s also a client. Four years ago, he lost his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), to a rare form of bone cancer. Under the advice of her doctors, Becca had tried to stave off the inevitable via a grueling series of amputations and experimental treatments. At night, Karsh dreams of her final days, of his wife limping around the bedroom, all scar tissue and surgical staples. Cronenberg is a compartmentalized surrealist; the night terrors are uncanny, but the video images of Becca’s body, moldering beneath her shroud, are cool and clinical. Cocteau’s Orpheus cannot look at his dead lover lest he consign her to the underworld. Karsh can’t look away. “It comforts me,” he says, glued helplessly to his own app.

Two strange things happen. The first is a proliferation of microscopic growths on Becca’s corpse, newly made visible by all that extra streaming resolution. “Once the bones are dead, the cancer’s dead,” says a doctor, who’s as confused as Karsh. The only way to study the growths is to exhume the body. The second complication is more urgent and disturbing. GraveTech’s executives are sent a cell phone video showing thugs vandalizing their home base, severing circuitry and overturning headstones. GraveTech is on the verge of global expansion; the attack is bad for business.

The proliferation of mysteries is unsettling—and exciting. Karsh has an active imagination, and so does Terry (Diane Kruger), Becca’s twin sister, who lives nearby. Terry is a former veterinarian turned pet groomer who lives her life perched on the edge of various rabbit holes, waiting for an excuse to dive in. Previously, she suspected that her sister had been the victim of a “doctors’ plot” (the nod toward Soviet psychiatry is deliberate). When Karsh asks her about the growths, her answer is succinct: “My money’s on tracking devices.”

Terry is a dead ringer for her sister, except that, as she says, her breasts are slightly bigger. You could cut the sexual tension between the in-laws with a scalpel, and Cronenberg triangulates the perversity by introducing Terry’s ex-husband, Maury (Guy Pearce), an IT specialist and freelance hacker who disappeared down his own private rabbit hole a long time ago. Now, he crouches there amid a warren of grudges and insecurities. Karsh and Maury regard each other tenderly as “brothers in sorrow” with identical taste in women. The contrast between Maury’s schlubby ensembles and Karsh’s sinuous fits serves as shorthand for their divergent fortunes and temperaments (Cassel’s costumes are by Saint Laurent, which also supplied financing for what was a low-budget production).

While Maury clicks around trying to figure out who’s targeting GraveTech, Karsh is wooed by a likely suspect: Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the wife of an elderly and dying European industrialist determined to bring the shrouds to Budapest. Over a meal of “greasy Hungarian,” Soo-Min proves formidable and alluring: She explains that, because she’s blind, her other senses are heightened, a power play wrapped in a come-on. The other woman in Karsh’s ear—and also consistently on all of his screens, including his iPhone, his laptop, and his self-driving car’s GPS—is Hunny, an AI helper bot programmed by Maury (a gift from one brother in sorrow to another). Hunny looks like a Memoji version of Becca (and Terry); she acts like a flirtier version of Siri, or maybe a distaff HAL 9000. She’s also a shape-shifter, at one point transforming, unsolicited, into a yassified, bedroom-eyed CGI koala bear. Soo-Min is wary. “Don’t trust your avatar,” she says, flatly.

Reality once removed is Cronenberg’s specialty: No filmmaker has ever been better in locating science fiction in the everyday, or observing the crimes of the future in the present. The Shrouds is stylized to the point of eccentricity, but it also plays eerily like a piece of vérité about a hyper-mediated world where focus and distraction exist in a mutual death grip and civilians become willingly imprisoned by their own devices. There are no voices of reason here. Everybody is paranoid, and everyone is an enabler: The currency of the internet realm is Loose Change. Over forty years ago, in his masterpiece Videodrome, Cronenberg channeled Marshall McLuhan’s philosophies into a trenchant satire-cum-critique of a rapidly mutating mediascape; The Shrouds is a thriller under the sign of Mark Fisher. It’s a secular ghost story about characters clutching at psychic shadows and chasing digital phantoms. Mesmerized by the spectacle of death at work, they can’t help haunting themselves. 

“Conspiracy theory is a grief strategy,” said Cronenberg last year at the Cannes Film Festival, where The Shrouds premiered in competition to a muted reception. It deserved better. Cronenberg has only ever won a single prize from Cannes juries—a special citation for “audacity,” tossed at his chrome-plated J.G. Ballard adaptation Crash. (The story goes that Francis Ford Coppola, the jury president, wouldn’t have touched the film with a 10-foot pole.) This time around, he was overshadowed by French director Coralie Fargeat’s body horror movie du jour, The Substance, a quasi-Cronenbergian work whose theme of the new flesh cannibalizing the old could be a metaphor for the industry’s indifference to a master. Studios are cultivating their own little brood of neo-Cronenbergs, while the genuine article struggles to find financing, if not critical validation. It’s not for nothing that he’s made Karsh a visionary in search of global distribution.

Cronenberg responded to the mixed reviews for The Shrouds by calling out a contingent of “very ignorant, stupid” film critics who failed, in his view, to reconcile the film’s wildly paranoid tone and plotting to its stoic study of mourning—or even to give it much of a try. “You might think it doesn’t work is one thing,” he said. “But to not notice it to me is a problem as a filmmaker.” These comments would seem out of pocket if not for two things. The first is that his movies have always improved in the rearview. They’re like full metal jacket bullets engineered to expand after impact, or delayed-release capsules that only gradually deliver their pharmaceutical payload. It would be inadvisable to watch a film like 2005’s lean and magisterial revenge-thriller riff A History of Violence only once. Check in with the movie, and Viggo Mortensen’s extraordinary lead performance, at regular intervals, and, after 20 years or so, every knot and fiber of the filmmaking will become visible, like the stratigraphic layers of an archaeological site.

The second is that The Shrouds is so obviously a film about paranoia—not only as a grief strategy, but also as a by-product of social media addiction, a handy tool of late capitalism, and a seriously potent aphrodisiac—that it would take, if not an ignorant and stupid critic, then at least a stubborn or unperceptive one, to miss it.

The same goes for anybody who doesn’t find The Shrouds funny. Comedy is subjective, but Cronenberg finesses the tone into a dead(pan) zone where every utterance seems somehow incongruous and inevitable: “I knew I was in trouble when I coughed up my entire esophagus,” growls an Icelandic eco-activist during a FaceTime call. The dialogue on the whole is a hoot, with Kruger getting many of the best lines. She also gets the most penetrating close-ups, in a tripartite tour de force that’s tinged, unmistakably, with a touch of Vertigo. Materializing out of the shadows during one of Karsh’s night terrors, Becca is a Hitchcockian fetish object à la Kim Novak; her broken and disfigured body is its own crumbling madeleine.

That Cassel is playing a version of Cronenberg here is clear enough. The director lost his own wife, Carolyn, in 2017, and he has described the script as being written in an autobiographical vein. The performance isn’t an impersonation, like James Spader’s in Crash or Mortensen’s in Crimes of the Future, but it captures something of Cronenberg’s silver-foxy artist-radical persona, and fully inhabits the material’s essential melancholy. Pulling on one of his own creations in an attempt to commune with Becca—to share her experience on the terms he’s tried to set—Karsh looks as forlorn and somnambulant as a zombie. A devastating gesture: Standing stock-still beneath the shroud, he clutches the material gently to his chest.

Cronenberg is always good for such striking compositions, and for queasily humanistic thought experiments costumed in genre-movie garb. Anyone who couldn’t see the metaphor for aging and senescence in The Fly, or the anxieties around inheritance and identity in A History of Violence or Eastern Promises, or the parental despair of Crimes of the Future, is watching his movies with their eyes wide shut. The Shrouds is filled with alienation effects, up to and including its terrifically abrupt ending, but there’s finally no distance in it, only the mix of strangeness and recognition endemic to any work of art. It’s a movie to clutch to your chest.