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.
A brilliantly cerebral thriller about the physicality of grief… Subtle but enormously rewarding.
The Shrouds 2024
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Body horror maestro David Cronenberg created this funereal film – a capstone to 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, 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.
The Shrouds is a clinically executed, withering work of self-assessment, interweaving morbid conspiracies with Cronenberg’s trademark affinity for the macabre, the bleakly humorous, and the blithely erotic. Alongside Cassell and Kruger, Guy Pearce shines as Karsh’s twitchy brother-in-law. A telling thread of delicate sadness runs through this examination of loss and longing that withholds nothing. — Tom Augustine