The Shrouds, the latest film from legendary director David Cronenberg, starts strongly with a promising thematic base, but eventually descends into a chaotic and confused mess.
★★☆☆☆
“How dark are you willing to go?” It’s a question proposed by Vincent Cassel’s Karsh, to a woman he’s just met on a blind date. It is also a question that filmmaker David Cronenberg has asked himself and his audience throughout his dynamic and unpredictable career. In the case of The Shrouds, it is an invitation by Karsh into his odd business, “GraveTech”, which creates tombstones that broadcast a live image of the deceased’s corpse below ground. The Shrouds does, as you would expect, get dark and weird, but frustratingly never on the same level as Cronenberg’s masterpiece, Crash. Instead, where that film excelled with its rich thematic work, The Shrouds, despite starting with a similarly promising setup, becomes a muddle of ideas and poor storytelling.
The Shrouds is inspired by Cronenberg’s personal loss of his wife, Carolyn, who passed away in 2017—and it shows. It’s a film coated in death, grief, and loss; all Karsh seems to wish for is to be buried in the ground himself, next to his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). Instead, he pursues the increasingly fanatical business adventure, with help from his former brother-in-law, tech whizz Maury (Guy Pearce). Thanks to this corpse voyeurism aspect of the plot, there is a disturbing nature to The Shrouds that is inescapable. Things become more complicated for Karsh and in turn the film itself, when some of the gravestones are vandalised.
Things are janky and oddly funny, as they often can be in Cronenberg’s films, but The Shrouds is undoubtedly his weakest and most bizarre screenplay and story. There are AI elements of the subplot that are rote and awkward, whilst a whole plethora of commentaries on subjects from paranoia and nationalism are crammed in without cohesion or sufficient expansion. When the Chinese and Russian elements of the plot come in, the film nosedives even further. It’s frustrating, because the first half of The Shrouds is so promising and transfixing.
This decline in quality is even more disappointing considering the impressive world that Cronenberg creates. Like so many of his other films, the worldview on show is deeply nihilistic, enforced by clinical, cold set design and interesting cinematography by Douglas Koch, who also lensed the impressive Crimes of the Future. That previous film from Cronenberg had a similarly curious concept to The Shrouds, but it managed to meld it together into something cohesive and memorable, even with all of its flaws.
On reflection, The Shrouds ultimately feels like a rehashing of many of Cronenberg’s career ideas and highlights: there is the sexual angle that has a disturbing quality to it; there is the cold, transfixing world on show; the future is shown as a scary, impersonal beast that will not be kind to humans. This should work, but the maddening plot eventually takes over. Even Karsh’s odd relationship with Terry (Becca’s twin sister) is intriguing, but descends into something akin to what we’ve seen before in films like Crash, but with none of the power or strong imagery. It’s a representation of The Shrouds as a whole.
The Verdict
The Shrouds is a disappointing addition to the otherwise stellar filmography of David Cronenberg, made even more frustrating by the promise it shows in its early stages. An increasingly confused and lazy story destroys much of the film’s thematic allure, but even so, The Shrouds is a surprisingly poor analysis of a strong concept.
Words by William Stottor
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