The technology at the heart of David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds is both easy and hard to believe as a public enterprise. While I’m sure Cronenberg himself, with his fascination with the evolution of the body, would be drawn to the idea of witnessing the decomposition of corpses in real time, it’s difficult to buy that much of the public would get on board with something so morbid, especially concerning their loved ones. And yet, it is completely within the bounds of reality to perceive a corporation exploiting people’s grief in such a way for profit. Cronenberg has often had very astute and plausible visions of dystopia where technology and the body are concerned, such as in Videodrome and more recently Crimes of the Future. Disturbing though the idea of GraveTech is, there is something eerily tangible about it as well.
Cronenberg’s own feelings on the idea are complex and indecisive, and that is reflected by a film that is both of those things as well, often raising points, themes, or developments it doesn’t quite resolve. There is an understanding clearly of the bizarre interest in the death of the body and decay as a means of processing grief that Cronenberg grapples with by confronting in a curious psychological way the imprint left of the body and soul of a loved one. He has confirmed his feelings about the death of his own wife were a motivating factor here, something clear enough in Vincent Cassel’s protagonist bearing a conspicuous resemblance to him. I can’t say that personal aspect doesn’t make the film more intriguing.
This avatar is just known as Karsh, a French-Canadian tech entrepreneur, who in his grief over the death of his wife Becca, created GraveTech, a business wherein through specialized cemeteries and an app people can see the bodies of their deceased loved ones underground, decomposing in real time, as a way of supposedly maintaining closeness even after death. The enterprise has its detractors, including Karsh's former sister-in-law and Becca's twin Terry (Diane Kruger). When several tombstones at GraveTech's central cemetery are destroyed and its system hacked, the security of the technology is thrown into question at the same time that Karsh is looking to expand its operations into Iceland and Hungary. He becomes slowly embroiled in both a technological and psychological conspiracy, still haunted by visions of his late wife and her cancer-afflicted body.
Karsh intends to be buried eventually alongside his wife; he remains fixated on her even as he pursues relationships with new women. This is a character with strange complexes -his personal assistant is even an A.I. program designed to resemble Becca- and Cronenberg really acknowledges that. How much comes from a real place is unclear, still it feels like a very revealing movie. Yet Cronenberg does well at articulating why Karsh is so compelled by the death of the body, what it means to him as comfort to still be able to see his wife's remains, and to at some level even covet death himself as a form of intimacy with her. There is a scene where he wraps himself in one of these shrouds to see what it feels like, while we see on the computer the visceral reconstruction of his skeleton, tissue, and organs. The movie is not so graphic as Cronenberg can sometimes be, but moments like this and the dismembered naked form of Becca in his dreams have a chilling effect. How fragile our bodies are and what they are really -these vessels of flesh- feels very near at hand in this movie. Part of Cronenberg's tact to convey the essence of mortality.
Of course, it is not very cleanly presented, and on that emotional level is discombobulated. Karsh is both obsessed with his wife, her deteriorating physical form and the memory of her, and resents her as well -particularly an affair she had had with the doctor who would eventually treat her cancer (those dream sequences emphatically connect him with her 'mutilation'). He's not so choked up in his other sexual dalliances -engaging in two simultaneously over the course of the movie, including with Terry who is suspiciously unconcerned given her resemblance to his late wife. There are occasional suggestions though that Karsh's perception of reality is unreliable -his conspiracy nut of a former brother-in-law Maury, played by Guy Pearce, who coded GraveTech's systems, showing up missing two fingers is a notable assertion of this. His claim of losing them under torture contradicted by Terry ascribing an old school accident yet Karsh never noticed one way or another in all the time they've known each other. There is a very lucid quality to the movie. Visions from Karsh’s dreams manifest in his waking world, his business world -as he and the corporation become intertwined. All while the mystery becomes increasingly convoluted.
At times the movie really feels like an expulsion of ideas and images, conversations and provocations that are linked in Cronenberg's mind but have a harder time coming together on screen. It makes for a very fascinating collage, but more of an unwieldy narrative where the mystery ultimately doesn’t matter so much and the roles of the players remain ambiguous, Terry included. Where focus is honed in on the tech that Karsh has manufactured, there’s some good commentary on the prevalence of A.I. and how insecure we really are in terms of data privacy; but it feels on a different wavelength from the more interesting personal stakes of the story for Karsh and his morbid relationship with his tragedy -how he can never truly move past it through the distraction of his company. And I appreciate how detached he is as this tech guru -an understated performance from Cassel that buffets much of the film, but is also tangible in the details of his costuming and his highly elaborate house, with a bed ridiculously surrounded by a koy pond -this is not a guy in touch with the average person. Kruger does connect more however, even as an enigma or perhaps some projection with just the right kind of sexual proclivities for Karsh. A magnetic presence on screen.
The Shrouds doesn’t pull any punches, and I like a lot the distinct themes it deals with and some of the ways that Cronenberg illustrates them, especially by the end. It is a fractured and difficult film though -the intersection of the technological with the biological is not as strong or compelling as in several of his other movies. Where it reflects a personal crisis, as revealing as its titular technology, it is intriguing -Cronenberg’s very singular outlook and mode of expression keeps the therapy exercise thrilling. And this goes a long ways to overpowering those frustrations of narrative and obscure symbolism. I may not know entirely what to make of it, but it is captivating nonetheless.
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