“The Shrouds” Is a Casket Case—and an Unsettling Vision of Techno-Paranoia

David Cronenberg’s new film, “The Shrouds,” contains the funniest and saddest blind-date sequence I’ve ever seen. Myrna (Jennifer Dale), a divorcée, is lunching with a widowed entrepreneur, Karsh (Vincent Cassel), who made his fortune as “a producer of industrial videos.” But Karsh has since moved on to other endeavors. For one, he owns the restaurant they’re in; it’s located in a cemetery, which he also partly owns. His wife, Rebecca (Diane Kruger), who died of cancer four years earlier, is buried right outside. Oh, and, before she was laid to rest, she was wrapped in a metallic shroud with a built-in high-resolution MRI-like scanner, allowing Karsh to monitor her decomposing remains via a digital app he devised, called GraveTech. (Why the app isn’t named A Tomb with a View is one of the story’s more perplexing mysteries.) Pulling up a feed of Rebecca’s body on his phone—or on her headstone, which has a built-in video screen—Karsh can observe the gradual discoloration of her bones and zoom in on her now hairless skull. Most grieving loved ones would be repulsed by such imagery; Karsh finds it comforting. “I can see what’s happening to her,” he marvels. “I’m in the grave with her.”

It’s worth noting that Myrna and Karsh were set up by their dentist, which is fitting, seeing as how their ill-fated encounter proceeds like an oral exam; there are X-ray images and signs of advanced decay, and by the end Myrna has been thoroughly whitened. Also worth noting: Cronenberg has described “The Shrouds” as his most autobiographical work. He wrote it after his longtime wife died of cancer, in 2017. Just in case we missed the personal dimension, Cassel—a Cronenberg veteran, having played a feckless Russian mobster in “Eastern Promises” (2007) and a sexually uninhibited psychoanalyst in “A Dangerous Method” (2011)—has been styled here in the director’s more subdued image: he sports a silvery, upswept hairdo that is as recognizably Cronenberg as an oozing orifice or an exploding head. Karsh could be issuing a mantra for the filmmaker’s career when he slyly asks Myrna, “How dark are you willing to go?”

That question betrays a hint of self-awareness, but it swiftly fades. Karsh is too consumed with his late wife’s body—and, just as crucially, with the technology that makes such consumption possible—to realize, or even care, what others think. But Cronenberg is considerably more knowing, and he handles this unabashedly morbid material with a disarming drollery. Much of the dialogue has an expository flatness, which only heightens the grim comedy of the whole conceit; Cronenberg’s cool, latex-sheathed touch keeps brushing up against your funny bone. He also builds in enough distance between himself and his alter ego to complicate our sense of “The Shrouds” as (merely) an auteur’s intimate confessional. In a 2022 interview with Adam Nayman for The New Yorker, Cronenberg noted that he still lives in the house he shared with his wife for many years; Karsh, by contrast, has sold his and Rebecca’s home and now dwells in an apartment of Japanese-styled serenity, with a futon bed ringed by a koi-filled moat. (The production design, not all of it quite so full of Eastern premises, is by Cronenberg’s longtime collaborator Carol Spier.)

Karsh, in other words, has encased himself and his sorrow in a cocoon of tech-titan cosmopolitan chic. GraveTech is catching on globally; backed by Chinese investors, it’s expanding into Icelandic graves and attracting influential clients, a terminally ill Hungarian businessman among them. But the company also has invisible enemies, and when the cemetery is vandalized—the systems hacked, the casket-cam headstones torn from their foundations—Karsh has a mystery on his hands. “The Shrouds” is unhurried and elegantly sombre, but it also shudders with mournful menace; Cronenberg, having halfway sold us on necrophilia as a business plan, now hooks us with a threat to that plan’s stability. Karsh is aided in the investigation by Rebecca’s sister, Terry (also Kruger), who is acerbic, affectionate, and visibly aroused by conspiracy theories. Terry’s ex, Maury (Guy Pearce), is a testier and less trustworthy armchair sleuth—a tech whiz who, with nebbishy bitterness, has never stopped trying to win Terry back.

At one point, Maury asks Karsh if he ever slept with Terry, given how closely she resembles his beloved Rebecca. Karsh scoffs at the suggestion; Cronenberg quietly tucks it away for later. Eventually, another woman enters the picture—Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the Hungarian client’s wife, who, unlike Myrna, is entirely unfazed by Karsh’s line of work. Beneath its fastidiously morose surface, “The Shrouds” is about the lingering power of grief, as well as the possibility of moving on from it. In Karsh’s case, the latter arrives in the form of a welcome, unexpected surge of erotic renewal. The sexual impulse, as ever with Cronenberg, is a volatile one: around the same time that it hits, Karsh begins experiencing hallucinations—or maybe memories—of Rebecca, no longer in skeletal form but in the living, breathing, soon-to-expire flesh. Cronenberg has often been hailed, reductively, as a maestro of body horror, but there is nary a flicker of revulsion in the gaze that both he and Karsh fix upon Rebecca’s brittle-boned, cancer-ravaged frame—only an undimmed appreciation of her beauty, and an irrational if entirely understandable hunger to possess it again.

When “The Shrouds” premièred at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, it drew a muted reception that was overshadowed by, among other things, Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance,” a gory feminist-themed freakout that partook liberally of Cronenberg’s influence but rather less of his finesse. Fargeat is not the only French filmmaker to have recently delivered a body-horror shock to the Cannes system: in 2021, Julia Ducournau won the festival’s top prize for the thriller “Titane,” whose frenzied warpings of flesh and metal suggested a gonzo elaboration of Cronenberg’s most notorious feature, “Crash.” What a difference a few decades makes. When “Crash” played at Cannes, in 1996, it was given a backhanded accolade—a Special Jury Prize—by a notably divided and scandalized jury. Now, at eighty-two, Cronenberg has lived to see art-horror cinema achieve international acclaim and mainstream success, of a kind that has continually bypassed his own pioneering work in the genre.

Has Cronenberg, once so ahead of his time, now fallen behind it? Like the director’s previous feature, the brilliantly dystopian “Crimes of the Future” (2022), “The Shrouds” has been regarded, and in some cases dismissed, as an autumnal effort—a series of artful yet familiar variations on an auteur’s well-known preoccupations. Whether the director is replaying his own grisliest hits—or, less charitably, edging close to self-parody—his latest films have been found wanting the shock of the new. But a will to shock has never ranked high among Cronenberg’s priorities; the audience’s horror has always felt less like a goal than like a by-product of a rigorously analytical process, in which sensations are subjugated to ideas. Flesh often stretches, melts, and ruptures, yes, but always in service of core principles: one way or another, the body must react and adapt to its own irrational desires, and to the seeping, churning influences of its environment. In “Crimes of the Future,” Cronenberg sliced people open not to gross us out but to reveal biological and evolutionary irregularities—to lead us into a deeper understanding of the world we are forever inheriting and destroying.

That world looks rather less apocalyptic in “The Shrouds,” which was shot (by the cinematographer Douglas Koch) on pleasantly nondescript Toronto locations; here, bodies decay for the entirely natural, inevitable reasons of illness and death. But the threat being diagnosed is a more insidious one. What begins as a drama of grief soon morphs into a study of how grief is exploited, manipulated, and compartmentalized. Cronenberg has made a thriller of justified technological paranoia, of the internet’s myriad parasitic intrusions into the human realm. In “Videodrome” (1983), Cronenberg shoved a Betamax cassette into a man’s torso; now, to make an equivalent point, he can cut to a conspicuously drawn-out closeup of Karsh using a tablet in a bathtub. One of the narrative’s key players is Karsh’s deceptively friendly A.I. assistant; her name, Hunny, suggests pretty immediately that she’s a trap.

The story doesn’t resolve so much as dissipate, in a series of almost comically perfunctory twists, reversals, and whispers of geopolitical peril. Has GraveTech become the pawn of nefarious Russian and Chinese power players, or is Karsh being used for more personal, spiteful reasons? It’s unclear, and the ambiguity spreads like an e-virus. By the end, the most disturbing thing about “The Shrouds” isn’t the notion of a corpse on camera; it’s the possibility that the corpse might not be there at all—that it might, in fact, be an artificially confected image, there to foster a comforting illusion of emotional and narrative closure. Even when purporting to tell his own story, Cronenberg cannot help but leave us with something more expansively unsettling. Karsh peddles a vision of how we might be laid to rest in the future; his maker remains fixed on how we live now. ♦