19/16
Karsh, an innovative businessman and grieving widower, builds a device to contact the dead in a shroud. Diane Kruger replaced Léa Seydoux in her role. Referenced in Film Junk Podcast: Episode 961: In a Violent Nature + TIFF 2024 (2024). Compared to the very mediocre “Crimes of the Future,” Cronenberg’s previous work and his return to the body horror subgenre that made him famous, “The Shrouds” is a return to something… acceptable would be the right word? But like that previous film, almost every scene in The Shrouds will likely remind you of another similar Cronenberg film that probably did better. You may particularly remember the great film Crash, which more memorably dealt with similar themes of macabre voyeurism and sexual fascination with death, physical corruption, and injury. It’s the curse of older, accomplished filmmakers that their latest works are constantly compared to their previous masterpieces, but it’s also inevitable when those filmmakers are so obviously out of ideas. The fact that the story, which is much more sophisticated than in Crimes of the Future, literally goes nowhere isn’t a major problem – it’s just a sideshow to play with more fundamental themes. But it’s still a tedious path, following our rather dull protagonist through some kind of investigation that gets more and more boring by the minute. I challenge you to actually care about the answers to the many mysteries at the heart of The Shrouds. You shouldn’t expect answers anyway. What matters is the psyche of our protagonist, which becomes clear from the opening scene (and I suspect the very last one, which had some of the sold-out audience laughing because it dropped the story rather spectacularly in the middle of nowhere). Both of these scenes actually convey the idea that the story is really about the grief of the death of a loved one, which makes sense given that Cronenberg drew inspiration from his wife’s death to write the story. And yet, again, it all feels like a late variation (if not a repeat) of things Cronenberg has already done and said, rather than a late new perspective on these themes. What bothers me most is that the protagonist never feels like what’s happening to him really bothers him deep down; Vincent Cassel, certainly the equal of James Woods or James Spader, is pretty good as a cool, cold tech entrepreneur interested in minimalism and crypto-necrophilia, but when it comes to expressing any kind of compulsion and fascination, there just isn’t enough of it to sustain the film. Worse yet, his supposed fascination never feels real, authentic, or all-consuming. There’s no descent to the dark side for our hero, no journey into the uncharted and disgusting swamps of his soul – or that of today’s society. And that, for me, is the most disappointing thing about The Shrouds. How the other pole of the director’s oeuvre, technology, is never really addressed. His best horror films explore the collective unconscious and how we humans interact with technology. How there’s no real opposition between the organic and the mechanical, but rather a true symbiosis in the making. How we are designed by our instincts and unconscious desires to appropriate our devices, merge them and do unspeakable things with them. None of that here, with an interesting premise that’s never really been explored. Having cell phones, self-driving Teslas and personal AI feels like uninspired box-ticking. The AI assistant part of the plot, like so many others, should have been covered in more detail, though I get the idea – behind our machines and supposedly autonomous technology are us and our shameful, unspoken desires. It’s a shame that “The Shrouds” chooses to stay on the surface rather than exhume the corpses that haunt our fantasies.