Written and directed by David Cronenberg
Death, love triangles, industrial sabotage and international conspiracy theories have never combined for something as boring as David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, a myopic grief tale that flails around in a conspiratorial mystery that’s less of a maze than a disorganized storage space for some interesting and many not-interesting ideas.
Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, widower and entrepreneur. Inexplicably well-off, he’s founded a company that sells coffins with CCTV so you can watch your loved ones slowly turn to dust. The idea came to Karsh when pondering how Judaism, his dead wife’s religion, prohibits cremation as the soul needs time to leave the body behind. Similarly, Karsh can’t let go of his wife, as she was, in his words, his world.
This is a tender sentiment and painful to hear, since it might take root in Cronenberg losing his wife in 2017, but it’s also the first and last thing that stirs something in you, because it’s merely the entrypoint into a paranoid quagmire where Karsh gets rolled into conspiracy theories involving edited images of bones, Russian hackers, Chinese spies, and much more base human feelings of betrayal and jealousy.
This rabbit hole is a shallow grave, and The Shrouds is plainly put boring. It’s the corpse Karsh watches through his screen, only we’re not obsessed, instead barely invested because so much of Cronenberg’s movie feels uninterested in itself.
If there’s a positive thing to say about The Shrouds, I’d like it near the top: Cronenberg has always been the master of conjuring up dead worlds. By that I mean places that feel like our world, only a shadow imitation, cold and void, an unnerving and uncanny twist on our unfortunate preoccupations, noticed and presented to us the way only Cronenberg can.
The Shrouds retain the Cronenbergian touch in this sense, only it’s faint. Howard Shore’s score, chilly and mournful, is instrumental in this regard, but it’s unfortunately scarcely employed. It’s absence is sorely felt once you get to hear it.
As for the rest…
Cronenberg’s script is a car crash and editor Christopher Donaldson is the dummy inside of it getting thrown clear on impact. There’s no rhythm, no tension, and no interplay between sound and picture at any point, the experience competing with airport infomercials for how quickly it can lose your interest.
Karsh’s conversations with Terry (Diane Kruger), the twin-sister of his late wife Becca (also Diane Kruger), are exposition until she’s reduced to an opportunity for sleaze, an extension of Karsh’s crass comments about wanting to possess his wife’s body and resentment towards those who “have had it” in the the past. Alongside it, the fraught relationship between Karsh and Terry’s ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce, maudlin and over-acting), a programmer who’s instrumental to Karsh’s business, is as artificial as it is tedious.
Cronenbergian characters as a group have never been the most emotive, but there’s no life to be found in Karsh, Terry, and Maury as they fumble around in their paranoid malaise. I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me some scenes were shot with actors in separate locations, and if every encounter in The Shrouds was a date, there’s not enough chemistry to warrant a second for anyone involved.
Cassel especially struggles without his trademark butcher’s dog insolence, charm, and irreverence. Karsh is certainly a little out of touch with life, like an afloat astronaut, but he has an intense yearning inside of him. In Cassel’s bewildered hands, however, it becomes some hapless depressed aloofness. You don’t have to like a protagonist, but there has to be some sense of complicity. In The Shrouds, you’re stuck with someone you’ll forget as soon as you lay eyes on them.
Cronenberg is still an incredible filmmaker and The Shrouds is just a bad film. There are more interesting ideas buried here than most other films: our need for a digital presence that goes beyond the physical plane, the unaccountable, unknowable nature of international espionage, insidious possessiveness – but Cronenberg starts this film feet six feet under, and like Karsh’s business, lets us watch the thing slowly worsen.
Mikkel Frederiksen 