***½/****
starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt
written and directed by David Cronenberg
by Angelo Muredda David Cronenberg is no stranger to illness and death, from the synchronized degeneration of the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers to the sickly corporeal canvas of performance artist Saul in Crimes of the Future. But the aftermath of death has never felt more personal than in The Shrouds, where the filmmaker plants his most explicit authorial doppelgänger in Vincent Cassell’s Karsh, a cryptically described “producer of industrial videos” who shares Cronenberg’s career interest in the body, his trim white hair, his puckish sense of humour, and his grief, which is so palpable it’s rotting his teeth. Made in the aftermath of his wife’s long-term illness and 2017 death, The Shrouds isn’t Cronenberg’s elegy for the dead so much as an exquisitely sad and bitterly funny reflection on the desperate, illogical, unfulfilled ways the people they leave behind–in this case, a filmmaker with a fixation on his deceased wife’s body–mourn them.
Following in the long tradition of Cronenberg’s obsessive protagonists, Karsh takes an unorthodox approach to widowhood, attempting to invest it with an agency that goes well beyond the usual therapeutic processes people go through. Compelled to be with his wife in death as he was in life, to the point of wanting to climb into her grave with her, Karsh has made himself an entrepreneur of resting homes, building a high-tech, nondenominational cemetery where mourners can view a 24-hour on-demand feed of their loved ones’ decaying bodies, the titular shrouds they are buried in surrounded by numerous tiny HD cameras that create a truly immersive pay-per-view experience. Tending to his wife’s corpse throughout the day on the grave app on his phone the way some people monitor their pets or plants when they’re at work, he lives a solitary existence, interacting only with his clients, his paranoid computer-wiz ex-brother-in-law Maury (Guy Pearce, in a twitchy part that feels written for frequent Cronenberg collaborator Don McKellar), and his wife’s earthy sister Terry, played by Diane Kruger. Kruger also plays Karsh’s late wife, Becca, in several intimate, surrealist dream sequences evoking the past. These involve her coming and going from their bed, either on her way to or freshly back from offscreen cancer treatments that amputate her leg and breast and leave her naked and vulnerable. Karsh’s routine of remembering and watching over his wife from the beyond abruptly changes when the feed to Becca’s shroud goes black following an act of vandalism on the graves, the mystery of which sends Karsh down a rabbit hole of online investigation with Maury, who suspects a cabal of antisemites, Russian gangsters, and Chinese deep-state operatives. Meanwhile, Karsh considers the possibility that a romantic rival for his dead wife’s affection may be involved.
What starts in a haunted, tragic register increasingly becomes madcap dark comedy as Karsh and Maury’s detective work leads them down strange tangents, many of them explored in Karsh’s self-driving Tesla, which eventually goes rogue and takes him to sites unknown. Though they’ve rarely been this farcical, Cronenberg’s films have always been funny. Even his most dramatic features yield their share of droll moments, like the throwaway bit in A Dangerous Method where the severe Freud looks on in crushing disappointment as his goofy pupil Jung succumbs to most unprofessional and untheoretical superstition, thinking he can use the power of his mind to predict when a lightbulb will flicker. Here, the comedy centres on the meaninglessness and cruel finality of death spurring Karsh’s unfulfilled body to distracting, substitutive sex with Becca’s sister and with a client (Sandrine Holt) preparing to mourn her husband, and his restless mind to pointless conspiracy theories that ultimately won’t do anything to restore Becca either to life or to her grave.
Some of the more ludicrous developments in this comic stretch are more irritating than funny, including a flat recurring gag with a flirtatious renegade AI assistant (also voiced by Kruger) that adopts the form of a koala for Karsh’s amusement. But there is a real tenderness, texture, and depth to the film’s depiction of Karsh’s yearning to be with Becca when it’s no longer possible, and his effort to marshal cameras and sensors and digital editing applications, the technological apparatus of his work as a filmmaker, to render her in her absence. “Her body was the world for me,” he says sincerely when he’s asked to move on. He’s unwilling to say goodbye to everything from her dental records to his fond memories of her favourite breast, the one he considered friendliest. Never particularly afraid to break taboo, Cronenberg doesn’t shy away from the horniness behind Karsh’s awkwardly persistent fleshly desires for his wife’s body, even at her most physically fragile and disabled. The result is a weirdly moving and singular late work that’s pitched somewhere between the eroticism of Crash and the swooning romanticism of M. Butterfly and The Fly, but that is also distinctly its own thing–a tragicomic romance about sex, dying, and cinema. Programme: Gala Presentations
