“You’ve made a career out of bodies,” says Terry (Diane Kruger) to her brother-in-law Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a widower hollowed out by his wife Becca’s (also Diane Kruger) death. This line will raise a smile for anyone even slightly familiar with the films of writer and director David Cronenberg, whose oeuvre, from The Fly to Crimes Of The Future, has always been profoundly concerned with matters of the flesh.
In this latest complex and captivating outing, the master of the macabre ruminates on bodily transformation in relation to sex, death and technology, from an especially personal perspective while maintaining characteristic gallows humour. (“Grief is rotting your teeth,” a dentist blankly informs Karsh in the opening scene.)
Cronenberg makes no attempt to disguise the fact that The Shrouds is autobiographical.
Karsh is the CEO of GraveTech, which allows mourners to view a live feed of their loved one’s decaying corpse via a screen on their gravestone, made possible by burial shrouds embedded with cameras. “It’s encrypted,” Karsh smiles at an amusingly unsettled first date. “Pun intended.” GraveTech’s expansion is threatened by mysterious vandalism of some of the graves in Karsh’s cemetery, including Becca’s, and a hack that interrupts the shrouds’ video feeds, leading him down a path of obsession and subterfuge. Has Becca’s body been tampered with by a business rival, Icelandic activists or the Chinese government? And could it be connected to the intrusive experimental cancer treatment she underwent?
Aided by Terry, Becca’s neurotic identical twin sister, her nerdy ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce), and a flirtatious AI assistant (Kruger again), Karsh attempts to uncover the truth in a coldly futuristic Toronto. All the while, Becca appears in dreams that are at once erotic, disturbing and deeply sad, her body increasingly mutilated as her cancer metastasises.
Cronenberg makes no attempt to disguise the fact that The Shrouds is autobiographical. The film was inspired by his experience of grieving his own wife, and Karsh, a white-haired former filmmaker, is styled exactly like Cronenberg himself. But this is no cathartic therapy session or earnest conspiracy thriller; the film seems more concerned with exposing the fallacy that technology can overcome mortality, or that death carries any inherent meaning.
Any new Cronenberg film is cause for excitement, but this feels like the defining work of his late career. As absorbing as it is intellectually rigorous, and as morbidly funny as it is strangely sexy, it’s bolstered by great central performances, all uncannily off-kilter. It could be too cerebral for body-horror devotees, but give it a chance and it might just crawl right under your skin.