Film of the Week #8: The Shrouds
David Cronenberg's latest is a frustrating grief allegory.
For some reason, I tend to associate David Cronenberg with William Friedkin. Both directors got their start in B-movie adjacent genre flicks, progressed in their respective careers long enough to attain a certain level of prestige, then returned to the old wheelhouse in their later careers. I don’t claim to be a Cronenberg expert. I’ve seen most of the big-ticket items – Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, and so on – but I haven’t seen much of his acclaimed ‘70s genre flick run other than The Brood (my favorite of his, followed by Scanners). But based on my cursory exposure to his work, I sense some inner conflict in his directorial identity: he is at once genuinely, even stridently drawn to kitschy horror/sci-fi concepts, yet he also remains stubbornly intent on expressing a psychological and philosophical worldview through those concepts. This is more apparent in Cronenberg than in other B-movie-coded directors because Cronenberg (especially in his late period) doesn’t feel the need to submerge his intellectual ambitions within an entertainment context: they often exist in the same film side-by-side, even seeming to alternate from “high-brow” to “low-brow” from one scene to the next, a sort of “one for them, one for me” thing except all in one film.
There are pluses and minuses to this personality split. When the themes of the film and the mechanics of the chosen genre concept play off each other synergistically, the end result can be strikingly powerful, such as in The Brood; we in the audience can at once indulge in the thrills of the genre while being stimulated by the contemplation of the interwoven themes. However, when the mix of elements is uneven, the effect can be off-putting, as it is in The Shrouds, where a dissatisfying narrative robs us of simple pleasures, while the hodgepodge of philosophical inquiries and personal reflections feel too inorganically integrated into the film to come off as anything more than ponderous and plodding.
The Shrouds sets up a promising initial concept: Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, a tech entrepreneur who is the pioneer of “GraveTech,” which puts deceased bodies into heavy, high-tech coats called “shrouds” that allow the screens on the specially designed tombstones to display the bodies in high-definition as they decay. (The commercial appeal of such a technology is assumed as a given, which I could only reluctantly accept.) Diane Kruger plays Karsh’s late wife Becca (who is buried in one of GraveTech’s cemeteries but appears in a series of dreamlike flashbacks) as well as Becca’s identical sister Terry, a conspiratorial dog-walker who had suspected the doctors of performing experiments on Becca during Becca’s cancer treatment. Karsh discovers strange growths on some of the bodies (including Becca) buried in his GraveTech cemetery; shortly thereafter, the cemetery is vandalized. Karsh calls in Terry’s ex-husband, Maury (Guy Pearce), who helped develop the technology behind GraveTech, to investigate. A veritable whodunnit is established, though the stakes are somewhat unclear. (Funnily enough, the plot most often seems to progress by following our concern for what all this means for Karsh’s business prospects.)
But a steady or riveting progression of the plot is obviously not Cronenberg’s first priority, which I somewhat admire in retrospect. The movie instead quickly becomes fixated on a slew of psychosexual tropes, each less justified within the context of the film than the last. Maury reveals his jealousy and paranoia over Karsh potentially having an affair with Terry (paranoia that ultimately turns out to be rational) all while Karsh sleepwalks his way into an affair with a 99% blind potential client, Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the wife of a dying Hungarian business mogul. Also revealed is a sexual rivalry between Karsh and Becca’s oncologist, Jerry Ekler, who in a particularly indigestible coincidence, turns out to have been her professor and former lover before she and Karsh met. As a kicker, once the cemetery is restored, Ekler’s corpse shows up out of nowhere to take the place next to Becca, which Karsh had originally reserved for himself. But in the end he wastes no time jetting off with Soo-Min, leaving the thread of his affair with Terry still dangling in the air.
In isolation, some of these contrived conceptualizations make sense to me, and I’m sure could be rolled into a more focused and successful film. The flashback scenes with Karsh and Becca in bed had the most depth for me. The grimly funny/horrifying scene of Becca’s hip breaking mid-coitus, for example, conveyed the sad, down-to-earth grief that Karsh carries around with him without needing to lean into anything outrageous. Even the high-horror scare of Becca coming back to the room on crutches with her breast and arm amputated had an interestingly tender undertone. And the later revelation that Ekler may have been keeping body parts as a sort of trophy is an intriguing complication in keeping with the theme of jealousy that finds its expression in the “ownership” of bodies.
What frustrates me is that Cronenberg takes seemingly no precautions about plausibility when constructing this web of sexual intrigue. The film becomes practically indecipherable by the end as I threw my hands up at the task of trying to parse the reasoning behind each of Cronenberg’s departures from basic narrative and character consistency. The most glaring issue with the film is Soo-Min, whose function and purpose in the film remains opaque despite some subtext establishing her as sharing a kinship with Karsh in their mutual need of physical intimacy. The ending sets up an interpretation that Karsh has found a replacement for Becca in Soo-Min, just as Becca may have found a replacement for Karsh in Dr. Ekler. This sounds neat enough on paper, but in reality it plays out as an egregiously rigid schema that nixes our understanding of Karsh’s love for Becca. In a close tie for most puzzling development, Maury’s “Russia/China” theory being seemingly exposed as a fabrication of his delusive mind made the long line of red herrings feel especially pointless, as the film opts to provide no closure to the whodunnit aspect of the vandalism. A part of me thinks that this willful destruction of narrative integrity is some kind of postmodern ploy, that Cronenberg is sending up the tropes of the sci-fi/horror/detective genre by making it impossible for us to really buy into any theory for too long. And I can find some sort of respect for the project as conceived along those lines. But the film presented to me in the moment, as an experience, felt just too bloated and random for me to take stock in those kinds of formalistic elements.