David Cronenberg’s latest dive into body horror imagines a world where the grieving can livestream their loved ones’ slow decay.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Once again in collaboration with cinematographer Douglas Koch of his striking 2022 effort “Crimes of the Future,” writer-director David Cronenberg gives us “The Shrouds,” an alternately morbid, funny, and sexy meditation upon death. Set in a world cloaked in inky gloominess, “The Shrouds” turns a light on both Cronenberg’s famous “body horror” aesthetic and his less famous personal life. That includes a protagonist named Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a silver-haired genius who looks a lot like his creator and has dreamed up a way for the living to watch the dead decompose in their graves by wrapping them in high-tech cloth. What inspired Karsh to create the technology was the demise of his beloved, beautiful wife Becca Relikh (Diane Kruger), who died after a long, ravaging battle with cancer (Cronenberg’s wife Carolyn Zeifman died in 2017 of an unnamed condition).
When we meet Karsh, he is on a date with a woman named Myrna (Jennifer Dale). In a move sure to slay the vibe, Karsh takes Myrna to his private cemetery, which looks disarmingly like a drive-in and where the tombstones have screens (there’s an app, of course). He then proceeds to show her an almost entirely skeletal Becca in 3D. Karsh notices some strange growths on Becca’s bones.
The film charts Tesla-driving Karsh’s attempt to get to the bottom of the growths. He will recruit his former brother-in-law Maury (a fabulously nebbishy Guy Pearce), his wife’s former radiation specialist (Jeff Yung), his wife’s tomboyish, dog-grooming sister Terry Gelernt (also Kruger) and his AI avatar Hunny (also Kruger) In the end, the reality of the death of our friends and loved ones and even ourselves is inevitable and, unless we choose to be cremated, we will rot, and “The Shrouds” is an obsessive elegy to that degenerative process. Cassel, who also appeared in Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises” (2007) and “A Dangerous Method” (2011), is the son of French New Wave leading man Jean-Pierre Cassel. As his director’s grieving, but also horny doppelganger, Cassel is fascinating. He has sex with Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the beautiful, blind French-Korean wife of a dying tech mogul from Budapest. Karsh has dreams about Becca in which she appears to him naked after a partial mastectomy and the amputation of her left arm below the elbow. The disease is eating her. Body horror does not get much more awful or personal. In bed with Karsh, Becca puts a little pressure on her hip, and it snaps with a sickening crack. Cronenberg hasn’t been this morbid and sexy since his 1996 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s fetishistic masterpiece “Crash.” In spite of (or perhaps because of) his obsession with his dead wife, Karsh has an affair with her sister, who is Maury’s ex-wife. Apparently, there is life (and sex) after death. Hunny turns herself into a koala bear.
Karsh has a conversation with a volcanologist in Iceland, who describes what happens when someone inhales sulfur dioxide (it isn’t pretty). Shattered, Karsh tells us that his wife’s body was his world. Was she having an affair with her doctor, who was her lover back when she was a college student? Maury lures Karsh into the woods to discuss a conspiracy involving the Chinese and Russians. Karsh is like some death-obsessed character out of a poem by Edgar Allan Poe. “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.'” Is he a necrophiliac Roderick Usher for our (end of) times? To a mournful melody composed by longtime Cronenberg collaborator Howard Shore, Karsh gets into a private jet with Soo-Min and soars through the clouds. Is this how Cronenberg, 82, imagines himself shuffling off this mortal coil? Cronenberg has many acting credits (he’s a regular on “Star Trek: Discovery”). As fine as Cassel is, one can’t help but wonder why Cronenberg didn’t play Karsh himself. In the horniest and most macabre role of her career, Kruger (“Troy”) is the latest in a line of major women actors who have played complex, often kinky leads in Cronenberg film: Naomi Watts, Holly Hunter, Lea Seydoux, Julianne Moore, Juliette Binoche, Keira Knightley, Judy Davis, Genevieve Bujold, Debbie Harry, Geena Davis and more.
‘The Shrouds’
Rating: R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language, and some violent content.
Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce
Director/writer: David Cronenberg
Running time: 119 minutes
Where to Watch: AMC Boston Common, Liberty Tree Mall, Coolidge Corner Theater and other suburban theaters
Grade: A-
Boston Movie News 