The editor’s note: This review was originally published in 2024 Kanes Film Festival. Sideshow and Janus Films release “Hyls“In selected theaters on Friday, April 18, 2025.
Inspired by the loss of the director’s wife is “The Shrouds” a sorrow story that only David Cronenberg Would ever think to shoot one: Sardonic, unsentimental and often so cadaver stiff that the film itself seems to suffer from Rigor Mortis, as if its images died sometime along their short journey from the projector to the screen. And really, what would you expect more? I suppose it is possible that the deeply personal context of history may have stimulated Cronenberg to push against the tender sterility of his latest functions, or even dares to reveal the soft underbelly that always hides in his tumor -rich work body and its many layers of scary new meat. If so, it becomes almost immediately clear that he had zero interest in accepting that invitation.
A crucial since film from an artist who has always been ahead of his time, “The Shrouds” is Cronenberg on his most inhospitable; As for the emotional accessibility of the project and commercial appeal, do it ”The crime of the future“Seems like”Barbie“By comparison. And yet, as with so many of Cronenberg’s most resonant films, its Morgue-like cold eventually reveals to be deeply comforting to some part-not while you look at it, perhaps when its great ideas start to seep into your bone marrow during the days and weeks that follow.
Between its paranoid distortion of a plot and a protagonist who is becoming increasingly difficult to see as something more than one Avatar for his writer, “The Shrouds” is suitable for a kind of delayed appreciation; Its story is only meaningful with the independent perspective that can begin to develop during the time between the death of a loved one and the funeral service where they are added to rest. The body is reality, Cronenberg likes to say, but what does that reality become when the body in question is buried six meters below the ground?
“The Shrouds” first stands out from the rest of the director’s corpus because the focus is less on the meat than on the legs below; All traces of the skin have already ripped off the body of the protagonist’s late wife when the film begins. She has been dead for four years, which has apparently been long enough for her widow-a Toronto-based futurist and “producer of industrial videos”-to create a well-financed evidence-AV concept for a bold new innovation in grief.
His name is karsh, he’s played by a smirking vincent Cassel (whose slab-like face and wiry gray Hair husband hey a dead call for Cronenberg, even before he dons the sunglasses that complete the illusion), and the fancy technology. SPEAK FOR A WIRED CEMETERY THAT ALONOWS MOURNERS TO WACK THEIR LOVED ONES ROT IN REAL-TIME, EHER WITH AT APP ON THEY phones or via the monitors attached to the top of each tombstone. It is effective a cinema of the dead, as so many conventional films have become since they are shot.
That night, it is possible that actual cameras are involved in the GrapeTech process, but the majority of the information that comes back from Beyond is generated by the radioactive sleeves that Karsh slides his corpse in before they are buried; Imagine what kind of sexy funeral dress can debut at Fashion Week and you have the right idea. At least you understand why this is one of several Cannes films this year that is co-financed by the production arm to Yves Saint Laurent.
Karsh believes that his morbid invention will enable people to maintain a meaningful relationship with the bodies of their life partners, even in death. His personal experience indicates that the installation of an open window in a closed coffin can help stabilize the disorientation that follows a devastating loss, if only because the ability to see a returned husband when decomposed on a screen can give the dead a more literal and continued presentity than an offline coffin ever, to preserve them as a fact. Where is Karsh’s wife? Well, she has just under the lawn outside his restaurant, and you can effectively facetime with her whenever you want (yes, our man has built a slate -gray restaurant next to Gravetech’s test cemetery, a biting will for his “life goes on” as well as the attitude for the murderous strange date he enjoys in the beginning of the beginning of the movie At the beginning of the movie, as typical of getting it very dry.
It is a relatively safe and solid concept, at least according to the very low technical standards created by someone in a David Cronenberg movie, and it seems to fulfill its intended purpose for Karsh and his clients. But there are … complications. For one thing, Gratech has not been able to prevent Karsh’s teeth from being eroded because of the grief – this may be the most beautiful movie that Cronenberg has ever made, subject to even more verbal logo than we received with “a dangerous method”, but his characters are still better expressed through their bodies than they are with their words.
For another thing, Gravetech is vandalized traumatically by a mysterious group that seems to have problems with Karsh’s technology and may or may not have anything to do with the Hungarian billionaire who wants to franchise operations all over the world. Such enemies, whoever they are, reflects the incongruity of a tool that promises its customers a kind of Stas that is in violation of the mutability in our deadly forms, even in death (all problems begin when Karsh messages begin new Bone deposits grow in his dead wife’s nasal room). Apart from his French accent, Karsh’s failure to predict this dilemma is perhaps the most obvious difference between himself and the director that he is so clearly similar, who has made the tender hub for his work for so many decades.
Unfortunately, Karsh is a fictional stand-in for David Cronenberg instead of the real McCoy, and that means he is filled with imaginative jumps and surrounded by characters that exist solely to confuse them. Characters like Diane Krugers Terry, a stingy dog groomer and sister of Hans Karsh’s late wife Becca, who happens to look exactly like her. What mental stress can, as for a man, so determined to remain contact with his spouse that he created a surveillance camera that he could spy on her for all eternity? And just to add damage to insult, cruis also Plays Becca, seems naked in a Morose series of nightmares that find Karsh that liberates the various, mutilated operations that his wife endured as part of her cancer treatment with a doctor she used to meet.
Kruger’s performance in these segments of the film is as cordial and haunting as her embodiment of Terry is tag and threatening, and that it is more than enough to make this the best work in her career, although she does not to do this best work in her career, even if she does not. also Play the AI assistant who organizes Karsh’s life. But she does and Boy Has her Siri coding some bugs to exercise. It would be a job for Terry’s ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce in “Iron Man 3” mode as a spotted and surprisingly convincing beta nerd that can’t move on because the woman he lost still lives just down the street). Hunny, as AI is known, is another aspect of this film’s many face obsession with the perception of body chopping and the unknown extent to which technology can be used to cheat grief.
Ever the pragmatist, Cronenberg knows better than falling into that trap himself, but does it make him cruel to organize Karsh’s entire life around the same principle? That question will be a devastating life when “The Shrouds” resigns from coherent narrative logic and begins to develop in the shady water in international conspiracy and accusations of schizophrenia – slowly at first, but then so fast that you can no longer say it is up.
Cassel’s slowly eroding Smarm makes it entertaining enough to see Karsh fumble deeper and deeper into the maze of his own feelings (probably as a way to save Cronenberg from suffering from the same fate), although the direction is so soothing and antiseptic that it often feels like the film is not moving at all. The flat aesthetics – and Howard Shore’s supplementary points, which give more of the same stunning drone as he gave to the “crime of the future” – fits a story about a man struggling to deny the colorlessness of life after loss and look at all the wrong places for a lively who can take his place. “I lived in Becca’s body,” he tells someone, in a vintage piece of Cronenbergian syntax. “It was the only place I really lived.”
“The Shrouds” is therefore a movie about Karsh’s quest for a new home, which is made impossible by his aching desire to return to the old one. It is a spiral labyrinth to nowhere where the only way out is to make peace with the fact that there is no one, and every plot detail that Cronenberg throws into the mixture – from Karshs tortured relationship with Terry to his flirtation with a blind woman and his skype -knotted with someone on the hedge of a red in Going. Avoiding reality only complicates reality; Shrouds do not allow Karsh to see his dead wife clearer, they hide his ability to see real life at all.
Ours too, to some extent. What I love about “The Shrouds” and why I can’t stop thinking about it is that it remains completely unsolved when it comes to Gravetech’s ultimate value. While I claim that Cronenberg does not evoke much faith in the alleged function of this death technology, it does not prevent him from seeing a measure of quixotic and too human sweetness in Karsh’s pursuit of continued signs of life. Becca is gone, and no trick of your imagination will bring her back. There is something to say for the old -fashioned brain that is not visible. But how beautiful it is that we will always continue to look for our loved ones in the world, even when we know exactly where we can find them.
Rating: A-
“The Shrouds” premiered in the competition at the Film Festival 2024. Sideshow and Janus will release it on Friday 18 April 2025.
