David Cronenberg’s sardonic self-portrait of his own struggle with grief is couched within a chilly and unsettling story of a tech-savant and his morbid invention which brings bereavement into the app age.
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The Shrouds 2024
Session dates and venues to be announced
Body horror maestro David Cronenberg created The Shrouds – a funereal film that feels like a capstone on a remarkable career – after the loss of his wife Carolyn to a particularly ravaging fight with cancer. Autobiographical elements have wormed their way into the story; the lead character Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassell), clearly styled to look like Cronenberg with his signature spiked silver bouffant, mourns the death of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger), who has been taken by a cancer that routinely required painful amputations. In his terrible grief, the sleek and sophisticated Karsh has founded GraveTech, a bizarre new technological frontier whose products are the titular ‘shrouds’, which reproduce the body in the grave as a 3D model that mourners can watch decompose remotely via a smartphone app.
Of a piece with Cronenberg’s other late style works, The Shrouds is a clinically executed, withering work of self-assessment, interweaving morbid conspiracies with his trademark affinity for the macabre, the bleakly humorous, and the blithely erotic. Alongside Cassell and Kruger (who eventually plays three different characters – wife, twin sister, and AI digital avatar), Guy Pearce shines as Karsh’s twitchy brother-in-law. A telling thread of delicate sadness pervades The Shrouds, a piercing examination of the messiness of grief that withholds nothing. — Tom Augustine