Andrew’s Take:
One of the most thrilling aspects of film-festival-going is seeing new work from old masters. Last year’s TIFF offered the rare treat of seeing the long-retired Hayao Miyazaki’s latest creation — and seeing the latest from David Cronenberg is a similar thrill. One of the few horror writers who can be said to have invented a subgenre all their own, seeing a new David Cronenberg movie is less about big scares and more about big ideas. Always rich in speculative worldbuilding and grotesque images, Cronenberg’s cinema is cerebral as much as it is embodied — and he seems endlessly fascinated by the thick entanglement that exists between the two. Few movies of recent years have felt like a visionary peek into the future as his aptly titled Crimes of the Future, with its bleak optimism about how humans will surely adapt to increasingly apocalyptic versions of supposedly “late” capitalism. As things have only grown more, well, Cronenbergian in the real world since that film’s release, what could a new Cronernberg film have to say?
The Shrouds feels like it started as a deeply personal and therapeutic writing project. Cronenberg lost his wife of 38 years in 2017, and this film centers on a conspicuously Cronenberg-looking Vincent Cassell mourning a similar loss. He’s a successful inventor, most recently made famous for his latest technology: shrouds that live-stream loved ones' corpses decomposing to the headstone standing above. When Cassell speaks of his late wife (who he’s still having vivid dreams about) it is with an unmistakably sexual tone, a morbid emphasis placed on the words her body in reference to a corpse. Diane Kruger plays both his late wife and his late wife’s near-identical sister, which of course carries heavy sexual tension all its own. Cronenberg has devoted much of his filmography to exploring the way that sexuality seeps into every crevice of the human experience, and here he does the same to grief. An oft-overlooked part of grieving, Cronenberg seems to suggest, is the grieving of bodily intimacy — missing the touch of your lover’s body against yours, whether in the heat of sexual passion or simply laying together. To me (admittedly a recently divorced person who felt this aspect of the loss pretty acutely), The Shrouds is easily Cronenberg’s saddest film, and it’s a type of sadness that only a body horror filmmaker could evoke.
Of course, Cronenberg can’t help but also get caught up in the Big Tech anxiety of it all, with the 24/7 surveillance of people’s bodies by way of these sleek and expensive looking body-bags. Much of the plot of this movie, which unfolds almost like an espionage thriller, involves the impossibility of truly private communication in the year of our lord 2024. Cronenberg also missed no beat in making a movie about the advent of AI-assistants, which many people will probably adopt without a thought for the fact that they work best when they’re listening to you all the time. In this way, The Shrouds is a kindred spirit with his son Brandon Cronenberg’s excellent Possessor, a film that downright terrifies in its all-too-real look at the way tech companies desire to peer into our most private moments in the hopes of better manipulating our actions. Where The Shrouds’s political imagination loses me a bit is with all the vague conspiracies about China and Russia looming overhead throughout. They’re perhaps reflecting something about the death of truth in our current geopolitical landscape — but I’ll admit, I got a bit lost in that Thomas Pynchon-ass plotline, which only grows more prominent as the film crawls closer to its head-scratching conclusion.
Grace’s Take:
I began my TIFF tenure with the new David Cronenburg film, The Shrouds. I tried very hard to prepare myself for what was sure to be a deeply upsetting meditation on grief and loss, and as I left the theatre I realized I could have never fully prepared for what I had just seen. Two films come to mind while reflecting back on this newest piece, this slow burn on life, death, and consumerism: The Fly, and The Brood. The Fly, Cronenburg’s film about deteriorating and debilitating illnesses that take our loved ones from us piece by piece, and how we begin to mourn them in the same increments. The Brood, a very angry piece on the divorce and separation from his first wife, runs parallel to this film coping with the difficult earthly separation from his second wife. These three films are semi-autobiographical, allowing him to express these messy, and life altering realities within a comfortable and familiar medium. These losses can become anything, and can mean anything to anyone. With all of this in mind, I began the Sisypheian task of composing this “review”.
The Shrouds, is a noir, a tech-noir, with death as a tangled web of clues and conspiracy. How can we let go? How can we grieve? For Karsh, a billionaire tech executive and widow, who still grieves the loss of his wife many years later, there is no right or wrong way to mourn. There is only his way. Karsh invents a new kind of technology, a stunning and invasive advancement in the funerary arts. The shroud, a burial cloth that wraps around the body, is functionally a camera, allowing people to see inside their loved one’s coffin, to watch as the body decomposes, providing comfort to those mourning loss, or perhaps prolonging their grief even further. They can see their loved one literally resting in peace inside Karsh’s new high tech, state of the art cemetery, and check on their loved one via an app on their phone. Finally someone has innovated death. Following the violent defacement of the Grave Tech cemetery, Karsh tries to solve the mystery, calling on help from his brother-in-law Maury, only to learn that the conspiracy is much more tangled than he thought.
Karsh is a hard boiled. He’s a man with a past, still hurt by it, with a proximity to death as a career, always finding his way into mysteries one way or another. Except his mysteries look like troubleshooting data difficulties and technical malfunctions, he is a digital hard-boiled. The primary mystery is how this breech in data happened, then a secondary mystery as to who destroyed and desecrated the dead. Add to that the mystifying events surrounding his wife’s passing and the inner workings of her slow death as her illness systematically destroys her body, and taks her away from him piece by piece. I also think that Karsh is covering up his involvement in the mystery. Tying up loose ends that could reveal his orchestration. Doing what he can to absolve himself of a guilty conscience, clean up any trace of his hand in it all, and the actual crimes and moral codes he’s defiled in the pursuit of…what I don’t know exactly. But he’s guilty of something. And to that add another layer of the mystery of grief, and how we mourn loss as we ask ourselves and the world around us “Why? Why did this happen?”
Twisting and turning from a portrait of loss, to an out and out whodunit, to psycho-sexual thriller, I tried to keep up, searching for clues as to how this film would end, ready to assign meaning and say to myself, “yes, I understand”. But I couldn’t keep up, and I didn’t understand and I still don’t. I have been constantly turning over conspiracy after conspiracy, hoping that something sticks. As a morbid, death-obsessed person with mourning rituals and rites all my own, I’m grateful that I have art like this that invites such speculation and introspection about life’s greatest mysteries. It’s such a treat to spin out from this story and get trapped in a web of obfuscation, lies and red herrings. I think that’s the real point, people can interpret this film and interpret grief and loss in so many different ways, there isn’t one and only way to cope with those heavy emotions and there isn’t one and only way to interpret this work.