Alex Moss EditorIn 2017 David Cronenberg’s wife of over 30 years, Corlyn Zeifman died. Cronenberg’s latest film, The Shrouds feels like a direct response to the loss he felt. But in typical Cronenberg fashion it is handled with a sense of the macabre and a twisted sense of humour that is often borne of coping with grief.
When his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) is taken from him by an aggressive form of cancer, Karsh (Vincent Cassel) invents GraveTech, a form of burial that allows those left behind to watch on a tombstone video monitor their loved ones in their grave, and over time their slow decomposition. Still longing for his wife, Karsh remains close to her twin sister Terry (also Kruger) and Terry’s ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce), who helped him set up GraveTech. But when several GraveTech tombs are vandalised Karsh begins to realise the technology is being targeted and must discover who in order to be reconnected with his wife’s corpse.
Due to the nature of Becca’s illness, Karsh literally watches his wife deteriorate in front of his eyes. This makes the concept behind GraveTech all the more pertinent; that as he watched her fall apart while alive, then letting that go in death is not easy. By creating a window into her continued demise he remains close to her.
In typical Cronenberg fashion, The Shrouds touches upon all manner of hot-topics. From the ability for us to be manipulated and lied to by AI, how global spanning corporations have come to dominate and control every facet of life, through to the more obvious themes of grief. Everything in The Shrouds is, forgive me, shrouded in secrecy. There is an undercurrent of mystery which at times derails some of the far more interesting ideas Cronenberg is exploring.
As has become his trademark, much of The Shrouds is dipped in body-horror. Not so much designed to repulse as to fascinate. Like his controversial adaption of Crash in 1996, The Shrouds explores the ideas of transformation and sexuality. That Karsh is aroused by his wife’s disintegrating form is both disturbing and fascinating to watch. And, given his slick-backed grey hair and dark wardrobe it’s hard not to see Karsh as an avatar for Cronenberg himself, a man exorcising his loss through an inability to ever truly let go. There is a romanticism at its core whichever way you look at it.
And throughout, there is a typically dark sense of humour at play – Karsh’ possessive nature over the physical form of his wife’s body, both prior and post her death. It’s wonderfully Cronenberg, only a filmmaker of this calibre can make such things funny. Akin to moments in The Fly as Brundle is falling apart he is able to see the irony in it all. So here, Karsh is more than able to see the bizarre nature in what he’s doing and often happy to poke fun at it and himself.
A deep-thinking, often funny and always pitch-black film, The Shrouds explores death through the lens of holding tight to let go.
