Cronenberg’s ‘Shrouds’ should stay dead and buried
In “The Shrouds,” David Cronenberg’s highly personalized meditation on grief, the situation is grave, both literally and figuratively. A tome on a tomb containing a widower’s dearly departed wife, the film is as self-indulgent as it is insufferable. Yet, you can’t resist sticking with it, anxious to see which kooky twist Cronenberg will introduce next in what ultimately proves a convoluted mess.
It stars the ever-fascinating Vincent Cassel (“Oceans 12”) as a man, like Cronenberg, trapped in an emotional limbo since his wife succumbed to cancer four years earlier. With his swept-back gray mane and ghostly visage, Cassel even physically resembles Cronenberg. He also thinks like him, in that no circumstance is too bizarre or macabre to explore, whether it’s a spouse’s decomposing body or kinky sex with the deceased’s look-alike sister who gets sexually aroused hearing conspiracy theories. Would you expect anything less from the man who brought us “The Fly” and “Crash”?
Cronenberg is 82 now, and he’s become somewhat obsessed with his own mortality as well as that of the loved ones he’s lost, chief among them, his wife of 38 years, Carolyn Zeifman. She passed in 2017, but he’s still shaken, driven, according to him, to redirect his lingering bereavement into his art. And “The Shrouds” is clearly a catharsis. For him, at least. For us, it’s a bit of an incomprehensible slog, sure to elicit lots of head scratching.
He freely tosses in a panoply of elements, from Chinese spies, computer hacking, sexy phone avatars, a nutty brother-in-law (Guy Pearce) and an oncologist who might be attaching info-gathering devices to the bones of his terminally ill patients. Little of it pertains to grief, unless Cronenberg processes his by tossing disparate ideas into a blender and seeing what churns out. It’s frustrating, increasingly so after a promising start, with Cassel’s Karsh dining with a woman (Jennifer Dale) in the restaurant he opened adjacent to his wife’s grave inside a Toronto cemetery he co-owns.
It’s a blind date facilitated by their dentist, and it seems as if it’s going well. After all, Karsh is a highly accomplished professional with a compelling past and an even more interesting future thanks to his invention of the Shroud. It’s a type of body armor with optical fiber sewn into the lining of the futuristic material to monitor a loved one’s decomposition via a phone app or a screen built into the headstone.
Karsh, in an Eastern European accent seemingly pinched from Werner Herzog, confesses to his date that he had an overwhelming desire to crawl into his wife’s casket and embrace her rotting corpse. Okaaay … Sans that option, his invention is the next best thing, as we see when he treats his curious date to a look-see at the remains of his wife, Becca. Like us, his companion is both mesmerized and appalled.
Later that night, vandals attack the high-tech boneyard, toppling headstones and severing the fiber optic cables. But only a few of the graves were disturbed, leading to the conclusion that they were targeted. Instead of summoning the cops, Karsh, fearing adverse publicity, summons Pearce’s Maury to help investigate the crime. He also calls upon his sassy, sexy phone avatar, Hunny (voiced by Diane Kruger), to do some digging, while he assumes the persona of a detective, quizzing suspects and sussing out clues.
Where the film lost me was when Cronenberg dons the proverbial tin-foil hat and starts bombarding us with various conspiracy theories, none of them the least bit provocative. But Maury’s ex-wife, Terry (Kruger again), a vet turned dog groomer, is all in, telling Karsh that “conspiracy theories make me hot!” Whatever turns you on. Meanwhile, Terry’s dead sister, Becca (Kruger yet again), has begun to haunt Karsh’s dreams, all of them sexual and all of them featuring an appearance by his beloved, missing an arm, a breast, or sporting grotesque scars. She’s also brittle as a China doll, to the degree that the slightest caress seems to result in a broken bone.
This device, of course, enables Cronenberg to delve into his lifelong curiosity with body horror, a genre he pretty much conceived and propagated with “The Fly” and “Crash.” But in raiding the (burial) vault, Cronenberg fails to extract anything new or revelatory. It’s just shock for shock’s sake. And it rapidly grows tedious. That’s when you realize there’s still another hour to go!
Some will have patience for this self-indulgence. Some might even admire it. But most, I suspect, will find it as perplexing as I. What’s the point? It’s certainly not a treatise on how to mourn. It’s more a filmmaker’s experiment in excess. And we’re his lab rats.
Wasted in the effort are solid performances by Cassel and Kruger, who have great chemistry. Certainly superior to that of Cassel and Sandrine Holt as Soo-Min, the mysterious wife of a doomed Hungarian billionaire. She seems to have wandered in from a low-budget Bond film.
Are the moves Soo-Min puts on Karsh legit? Or, are they a part of some nefarious plot? It doesn’t matter, because either way, you couldn’t care less. That goes double for “The Shrouds,” a film in such decay that it should have mercifully remained under wraps.
Movie review
The Shrouds
Rated: R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, some violent content, language
Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce and Sandrine Holt
Director: David Cronenberg
Writer: David Cronenberg
Runtime: 119 minutes
Where: In theaters April 18 (limited)
Grade: C+
