Written by: David Cronenberg
Starring: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt
Rating: [2/5]
There’s no right way to mourn the loss of a loved one. No script exists as no one can fully comprehend exactly what the loved one meant to those left grieving. Therefore, judging others for the way they grieve feels like a cruel exercise, except for what transpires in The Shrouds. This exploration into grief, while very personal to the filmmaker, leaves plenty to be desired as far as creating a thoughtful piece of art.
Still grieving the loss of his wife, Karsh (Vincent Cassel) found a way to process his pain by inventing GraveTech, which covers a dead body with a shroud and allows the family to view the decaying body whenever they please through an app. When disruptors come by to damage several of the tombstones and hack into the encrypted network, Karsh enlists the help of others to get things back and running.
David Cronenberg has always fascinated me as a filmmaker in the various modes he operates within. One can easily find the commonalties between his films, especially his keenness to dive into the matters of the corporeal in a fair amount of detail. In The Shrouds he dives into this arena with mostly examining decaying bodies through something as simple as an app on one’s phone. In theory something so callous in nature to view someone you loved where it makes you wonder at what point does the body of the loved one even matter as much. If one believes in souls, then it has left the body long ago at this point, which just leaves this skeleton for one to continue to observe.
The Shrouds presents many fascinating ideas on their surface but then we have to actually watch the final product and we receive this lifeless and disconcerting film. Again, this feels rude to say given Cronenberg lost is wife relatively recently and this film serves as a project assisting him through his own personal grieving, but the messiness of this film leaves a distinctly sour taste. It indulges far too much in nonsense towards its third act and just devolves into a level of strangeness not backed by anything meaningful. It dives into a fascination of conspiracy that begins to lose the very focus of this entire project.
It would not be the first time directors have inserted themselves into films through a character but the way Cronenberg does it utilizing Vincent Cassel styled to look like him and then indulging in overly long sex scenes raised many questions. They definitely serve their purpose but just makes this journey of grieving one’s wife a bit strange as the messaging at the core of this film continues to muddy the waters. This especially happens when Karsh begins to sleeping with the twin sister of his deceased wife, who somehow gets turned on by the ideas of conspiracy theories. The sex scene they share proved difficult to get through, as it reaches a level of tactlessness that took me out of the film. Again, everyone grieves in their own way but I am certainly judging everything happening here with Karsh.
All of these bad vibes transpire before we get into all of the nonsense that transpires with Maury (Guy Pearce), the ex-husband of his deceased wife’s twin sister. He enters the fray and has an involvement in this story that gets more ridiculous as it goes all the way until the third act that just had me completely giving up any prospects of liking this film. Pearce, by no means, puts in a bad performance but this character takes the plot of this story in a direction completely off the rails, which did not help a film I already struggled to get through.
The more I sit and think on The Shrouds I oscillate between liking the ideas of grief and technology more but also hating the direction the film goes after the first act. This film devolves into nonsensical conspiracy nonsense just when it had the runway to process more the elements that actually helped. It also does not help Cronenberg utilizes this film to fantasize what it would look like to portray a man who every woman in this film wants to sleep with, evidently.
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