The Shrouds

The title of David Cronenberg’s latest film resonates in myriad ways. “The Shrouds” is the name of an exclusive Toronto cemetery co-owned by inventor/entrepreneur Karsh (Vincent Cassel), whose company, GraveTech, offers clients the opportunity to behold their dearly departed’s cadaver as it decomposes in real time. This can be done on-site during visiting hours via a touchscreen mounted to the assigned headstone or online anytime via an app; both methods connect to a series of subterranean cameras surrounding the corpse, providing 360-degree views. Early in the film, we hear Karsh, a widower whose beloved dead wife, Becca, is a permanent resident of The Shrouds, give a layman’s explanation of the technology to Myrna (Jennifer Dale, in a brief but elegantly balanced performance), a woman with whom he’s on a first date—one that begins at the cemetery’s chic restaurant. Trying to gauge Myrna’s oscillating ratio of intrigue and unease, Karsh hesitates before offering a full tour. “How dark,” he asks, “are you willing to go?”

The question doubles neatly as a provocation for the prospective spectator. Blending morbid obsession, visceral grief, and shameless innuendo, Karsh’s allure, like that of The Shrouds, which pivots between mournful memory play and abstruse conspiracy thriller, will not be to everyone’s taste. Some will be dismissive, some will be disgusted, perhaps offended, while others will recognize a network of chilling insights into the psychology of sorrow and the ways our voyeuristic fetishization of technological novelty, from virtual assistants to autonomous vehicles, has opened the floodgates to a global surveillance state: every device introduced in The Shrouds reminds us how we opt in to our own peril. To note that aspects of the story are risible or prurient seems barely relevant, as so many of Cronenberg’s films, including several of his best, such as Videodrome (1983), Dead Ringers (1988), and Crash (1996), thrive on turning audacious, abstract ideas into urgent, corporeal melodramas. Their surface silliness doesn’t negate their psychic impact. What complicates responses further is the fact that Karsh is so clearly modeled after his creator, not only because of that distinctively swept-back silver mane, which from a distance renders Cassel a Cronenberg doppelgänger, but also because, as the Canadian auteur’s admirers likely know, Cronenberg himself lost his beloved wife, Carolyn Zeifman, in 2017. This meta-knowledge infuses The Shrouds with a heavy air of intimate disclosure: the film is, at heart, personal essay shrouded in speculative fiction. Though, this being a Cronenberg film, that disclosure is balanced by a wide-eyed fascination with the relationship between bodies and machines. The Shrouds is haunted by the question of who owns our bodies, in family and marriage, work and play, sickness and health, life and death.