Shrouds stars Vincent Cassel as Karsh, an entrepreneur who has revolutionized the act of mourning by offering friends and family of the deceased a real-time window into the decomposition process of their loved ones.Sophie Giraud/Gravetech Productions
The Shrouds
Written and directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger and Guy Pearce
Classification N/A; 119 minutes
Opens in select theatres April 25
Critic’s Pick
“How dark are you willing to go?”
This particularly leading question is posed early in David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, uttered by a dashing but haunted entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel). Subjecting his blind date Myrna (Jennifer Dale) to one of the most uncomfortable lunch-time inquisitions ever captured on film, Karsh is explaining the technology powering his company, GraveTech, which has revolutionized the act of mourning by offering friends and family of the deceased a real-time window into the six-feet-under decomposition process of their loved ones – including, as Karsh tells Myrna rather nonchalantly, his recently passed wife, who is buried just outside the chic restaurant the pair is dining in.
Dark? Undoubtedly. But Karsh’s query is also laced with a pained, desperate twinge of hope – the kind of pitch-black desires that have fueled nearly the entire Cronenberg canon. And with The Shrouds, the filmmaker – not only one of Canada’s greatest creations, but cinema’s, too – has delivered what might be his career-defining masterpiece.
Diane Kruger plays the deceased wife of Vincent Cassel’s character in The Shrouds.Sophie Giraud/Gravetech Productions
The painful first-date scene that opens The Shrouds is something of a fake-out, Cronenberg’s dryly witty way of introducing us to Karsh’s inner turmoil. In a near-future Toronto, Karsh is a man out of sync with himself and his surroundings. His dreams are dominated by visions of his late wife Becca (Diane Kruger), erotic fantasies that quickly curdle into something more violent and unnatural. And his waking hours are just as disturbed, especially after one of his gravesites, including the burial plot that holds Becca’s body, is desecrated. The large-scale vandalism not only threatens GraveTech’s global business aspirations – with plans for a high-tech cemetery in Budapest now compromised – but begins to stir Karsh’s suspicions surrounding Becca’s cancer treatment, and the mysterious doctor who cared for her.
Karsh’s twinned investigations into the corporate sabotage and Becca’s death are complicated by the involvements of Becca’s twin sister Terry (Kruger, again) and her ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce). The former tempts Karsh with a familiar kind of bedroom partner, while the latter spirals so deep into geopolitical paranoia that it becomes impossible for any member of this extended and bifurcated family to see where the truth ends and the delusions begin. Add the presence of the seductive Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), who is overseeing the planned Budapest cemetery as her Hungarian-tycoon husband approaches death, and Karsh’s world tilts upon its fragile axis wildly.
An enormously thoughtful, patient and frequently funny dissection of memory, sex and the expiration date that we are all staring down, The Shrouds lands as something of a grand syllabus of Cronenberg Studies.
When Karsh dons the film’s titular device, a high-tech cloth covered in micro-cameras, he is wrapping himself in the same kind of meta-creation as Viggo Mortensen’s self-mutilating performance artist did in 2022’s Crimes of the Future. Every time that Becca penetrates Karsh’s dreams, missing one new limb for each respective appearance, the visions cannot help but recall the scarred sex of Crash. There can be a serrated line drawn between the Becca/Terry doubling and the Mantle twins of Dead Ringers. And on and on, the Cronenbergian Cinematic Universe contracting and expanding as if outside the director’s own control, a fully alive thing – not unlike, say, the pulsating torso of Videodrome’s Max Renn – which might also be the closest we will ever get to a true self-portrait of the artist.
Take Cassel – collaborating with the director here for a third time after supporting roles in Eastern Promises and A Dangerous Method – who is clearly stylized as a Cronenberg doppelganger (with the same high shock of white hair and black-on-black attire) who even lives in the same part of midtown Toronto (this might be the only film in history to shout-out United Bakers Dairy Restaurant and Cedarvale Park). But Karsh is also reckoning with the same deeply personal issues the filmmaker himself faced after the death of his wife, Carolyn, in 2017.
As Cronenberg said ahead of the film’s Cannes premiere last year, it took him several years to think about the loss beyond mere pragmatic concerns. But The Shrouds cannot wholly be thought of as a cathartic act, either. “Art,” the director said, “gives you the illusion of control, the illusion of meaning. Is that cathartic? I don’t think so. It doesn’t diminish the pain, but it gives you a way to engage in that it’s not just curling up in the fetal position.”
In that sense, Karsh’s journey – in which he desperately tries to finger so many different outside conspiratorial forces as the culprits who robbed him of Becca, rather than accept that loss is the only natural thing in an increasingly unnatural world – feels rare, even dangerous. Should we be so privy to the fears and anxieties of someone in the deepest throes of grief? Engaging with his loss might not have erased his pain, but Cronenberg also goes beyond what any audience can reasonably ask of an artist. There is a kind of transcendence here that feels grand and final.
Yet The Shrouds isn’t a last will and testament from Cronenberg, either, no matter his frequent threats of retirement. If anything, this is evidence of a fiercely alive filmmaker, as charged in his passion and committed in his ambitions as ever.
The director’s command over his story extends to his curiously international cast. Cassel and Kruger are wonderful – the latter also having a blast embodying the voice and visage of Karsh’s artificial-intelligence personal assistant, Hunny – but Pearce is particularly delightful. Playing a squirrelly schmuck with a fondness for matzo ball soup, a Semitic inversion of his barking Anglo-Saxon tyrant from The Brutalist, Pearce lets himself fall deep into Cronenberg’s many, filthy rabbit holes until he emerges fully unrecognizable.
Cronenberg ends The Shrouds on a seemingly abrupt note – a ride off into the sunset that initially feels disruptive and confounding, a brick wall to the mysteries the film had until then been feverishly pursuing. But subsequent viewings reveal a finale that is more generously full-circle, a dim light beckoning at the end of a long tunnel. How dark are we willing to go? All the way.
