TIFF 2024: Body Horror Meets Black Comedy in Cronenberg's Deeply Personal 'The Shrouds'

By Lindsay Traves | Film | September 17, 2024 |

“Greif is rotting your teeth,” are the first words spoken in David Cronenberg’s latest. Vincent Cassel as Karsh—a presumed stand-in for the director as well as a dead ringer — is gently encouraged by his dentist to tackle his grief so as to protect his bony protrusions. For Cronenberg, most everything is physical, the father of “body horror” often using the physical self as a conduit to experience human emotion more so than speech or delivery. Karsh is grieving his late wife, a woman whose body he so misses that it inspired his tech venture, Grave Tech, which wraps bodies in high-tech shrouds to allow family members to view real-time three-dimensional interactive videos of their loved ones buried beneath the ground.

Soon after he discovers an anomaly in the video feed of his late wife’s bones, Karsh is hit with the news that eight of his high-tech grave sites have been looted and destroyed. The widower is forced to become distracted from his grieving by a pragmatic need to work: to solve the mystery of the anomaly he saw on Becca’s bones and who looted his graves and why. But it’s all just that, a distraction. Yes, the film has themes of conspiracy theorists, antisemitic lies about doctors, capitalism, environmentalism, and Nazi experiments, but they’re secondary things for characters to react to so we may better understand their personalities and ability to manage their emotions. As Karsh tries his best to keep the vandalism under wraps, find the culprits and their intent, and grow his business by charming potential clients and site owners, he is stopped constantly by his need to remember his wife and how badly he wishes to wrap himself around her flesh and bones.

Cronenberg, who sat down for a Q and A after his film screened at TIFF, has been candid that this film is a personal one whereby he is exploring the grief of losing his wife, Carolyn, in 2017. “All grief is different,” he told the audience, explaining how books he read about grief didn’t speak to him, which was the genesis of this film. For Cronenberg, the self is in the physical body (an interesting philosophical question that his son’s films seem to answer quite differently), as he describes that when a body is in the room with you, that’s the reality, and when it dies, they cease to exist. It’s this idea about the body as the self that makes The Shrouds move as a specific idea of grief. Karsh misses his wife, he misses her body, he laments the cancer that hurt her body, he envies the doctors that spent time with parts of her body, he wants to continue to be close to her body after death, he desires Becca’s sister (played by Diane Kruger in one of her three roles) as her body is similar to hers.

Cronenberg has never been one to make films that neatly sit within a genre, which is probably the catalyst of “body horror” being an oft-used closest attempt. For Cronenberg, genre is just marketing, and it’s true as his films often blend elements of other genres to create something “Cronenbergian.” The Shrouds is as much a black comedy as it is a science fiction horror drama, one filled with gruesome nightmares of mutilation. The self-described atheist with a secular Jewish upbringing has blended those sentiments here, never once having the grieving man consider Becca’s afterlife as some state beyond this plane, but instead being fixated on the state of her decomposing body (that he does not call a “corpse”). That’s paired with a distinctive black comedy approach to the absurdity of the ordeal, the film taking us through the exposition of Grave Tech through Karsh explaining it to his barely willing blind date, who winces at the experiment while trying to remain supportive. “How dark are you willing to go?” he asks her over lunch as she prods into his life story, the film coolly exemplifying the awkward experience of needing to discuss grief and loss as any facet in one’s background while getting to know a new companion.

Cronenberg might have made a nearly two-hour manifestation of one man’s grief, but he brilliantly uses shorthand to expand upon his premise. Smartly, he has different characters react to the image of Becca’s body, including her zany brother-in-law (in a sweaty performance by Guy Pearce reminiscent of his Aldrich Killian before pictures), her sister, and a stranger as a means of contrasting different people and people with varying connections to the deceased might. It also highlights the self-awareness of the director whose in-movie avatar feels compelled to be in the grave with his wife, with her body, while other characters seem to find it futile and grotesque.

Striking as the approach to a personal experience of loss is the film’s aesthetic. Though graced with different tones, The Shrouds looks similar to Crimes of the Future in its sharp visual contrast. Day or night, scenes are painted with bright light and stark black shadows. Cinematographer, Douglas Koch, worked on both and the visual style is evident. Long time collaborator, Howard Shore, composed the score which adds another layer to scenes and also denotes the Cronenbergian “genre,”—the opening tones played over the first credit immediately let a savvy viewer know that this is a film by Cronenberg, it’s got some science fiction, and it has a somber pace. Performances are grand, the actors held within the boundaries of a film asking them to speak their minds more than show their emotions. Kruger plays multiple roles and imbues them each with a differing swagger, and Cassel is stoic and icy until the moment he finally drops his façade and chokes up.

The Shrouds is such a beautiful film from such a singular filmmaker; I feel fortunate to have experienced it, and unfortunate I am unable to rewatch it immediately. David Cronenberg was unable to find a story of grief that spoke to him, so he made his own, and this one has no illusions of being the one meant to speak to everyone either. Cronenberg’s movies have never been made for everyone, and that’s what makes them so special, him so unafraid to ask grotesque and vile questions about everything from sexual proclivity to technology and the environment. The Shrouds is the next step in that, Cronenberg telling his own story so an audience may bask in a particular experience, whether it’s exactly like theirs or not.

The Shrouds had its North American premiere at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. It is still seeking distribution.