The Shrouds Review: Failed Attempt to Deal With The Death Of David Cronenberg | Cannes 2024

Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pierce

Director: David Cronenberg

Where We Saw It: at the Cannes Film Festival

Filmyhype.com Ratings: 2.5/5 (two and a half stars)

The Shrouds was one of the most anticipated titles at Cannes 2024, it marked the return of the master of body horror: David Cronenberg. Among the films in competition, it is perhaps the most personal, most intimate, and necessarily so given that the Canadian director chiseled it by connecting it to the memory of his wife, Carolyn Zeifman, who died seven years ago. However, the final result, however pleasant, is lower in caliber, sensitivity, audacity, and coherence compared to other titles by the Maestro, it is almost an interlocutory work, but it was reasonable to expect more. David Cronenberg has been married twice: the first time, to Margaret Hindson, ended in such a hostile divorce that the Canadian filmmaker exorcised everything with one of his most brutal feature films, Brood. The second union was happier and ended only due to the death of his wife Carolyn Zeitman, in 2017.

Even in this case, Cronenberg reacted by transforming his pain into a subject for the screen, which became a feature film after the first version was conceived as a series for Netflix. A feature film presented as a world premiere, in competition, at Cannes, like most of the director’s films from 1996 onwards, and which we talk about in our review of The Shrouds. We are being shaken by body horror, enchanted by the ability to stage murky relationships, awareness of the body, and the nuances of the soul. What a wonderful author David Cronenberg. It is one of those names that remind us how lucky we are to have been guided on the Styx by such an innovative and lacerating Charon. And this is why we expected so much from The Shrouds, Cronenberg’s new film which arrives two years later, again at the Cannes Film Festival, from what was announced as his great return: Crimes of the Future. Let us therefore try to understand in our review which dark corners the Canadian author wanted to point to.

The Shrouds Review: The Story Plot

The Shrouds has as its protagonist Karsh (Vincent Cassel) who in a gray and sleepy Toronto is trying to come to terms with the disappearance of his wife Rebecca (Diane Kruger), who had to succumb to a terrible tumor, which had left her disfigured in body and soul. However, from that pain, Karsh created GraveTech, a company with which he intends to revolutionize not only the concept of burial but also the relationship with the very remains of the deceased. Cutting-edge technology and 3D simulations allow control and monitoring of the remains inside that cemetery, on which he even had a successful restaurant built. The idea is controversial and meets various opponents inside and outside the country, but it seems to be destined for success. However, one evening, the cemetery and several tombs are desecrated and destroyed. As if that wasn’t enough, Karsh notices that his wife’s bones present strange alterations, theoretically due to the radiotherapy Rebecca underwent, but something doesn’t add up to him. His suspicions are fueled by Rebecca’s sister, Terry (again Diane Kruger), and her brother Maury (Guy Pearce), Terry’s ex-husband.

Karsh will seek answers and comfort in the AI ​​Hunny, made in the image and likeness of his wife, but also the charming Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt). But something doesn’t add up to him, something is shrouded in a mystery that he doesn’t believe he can solve completely, not alone and his wife continues to chase him like a sweet memory or an obsession. The Shrouds was supposed to be a series for Netflix, but then nothing came of it and so the director of Naked Lunch and Crimes of the Future decided to take over the project, clearly autobiographical and very personal, and bring it to the Croisette in the form of a feature film where different topoi of his cinematography shine, but also different variations in tone and genre. However, the final result is far from the peaks that the master of body horror has offered us in his career, especially due to a writing that is too convoluted and too connected to continuous variations in tone, because in the end, the repetitiveness takes over the whole, leaving a feeling of emptiness that much of the criticism has underlined. It’s a shame, because, in terms of inspiration and idea, The Shrouds would theoretically know how to assert themselves.

The Shrouds Review and Analysis

The Shrouds has a photograph by Douglas Koch that is perfect for representing the sado-maso-mortuary climate, but also purely ironic and sarcastic, which David Cronenberg chooses for all 116 minutes of this strange film, halfway between a neo-noir, a thriller with erotic undertones, but a very nuanced body horror, where we are far from the conceptual and even visual extremes that he has always had as his strong point. The sets are halfway between brutalism, modern Japan, and cold Nordic elegance, they contribute to making the whole dark, but not as dark as one would expect. The problem lies in the initial idea, that vision of decomposing bones and tissues (who would want that?) of the deceased, but then in the script itself. After offering shreds of the protagonist’s sick fantasies and mortuary obsessions (to which Cassel gives a cold charm), he gets completely lost in strange and tortuous narrative alleys inhabited by hackers, conspiracy theorists of all sorts, Chinese spies, Russian Mafiosi, and so on. the more you put.

The feeling of unattainability of the truth about his wife’s death finally becomes repetitiveness connected to thinking about death which is the gateway to that sex which Cronenberg still masters with mastery, but which does not go beyond irony or getting naked with sick and infantile fantasies.  The Shrouds lacks real depth, something other than looking for the right joke, the right effect, the revealing of a path of personal acceptance of mourning which, however respectable, from an artistic point of view here is pure appearance but little substance. References to different religions and mythologies emerge here and there, but the film doesn’t know whether to be plausible, realistic, or a journey into the mind. It becomes a mix of all these things but without affecting deeply. Even connecting to new technologies, with AI, personalized apps, Tesla cars, and digitalized death, appears clumsy, almost as if Cronenberg had wanted to follow fashion, the same one that ultimately affected other films brought to the Jury right here at Cannes 2024. Kruger also remains trapped in a double role that has nothing double about it, just like the film itself, which aspires to be the door towards a double vision of death and desire, but ultimately becomes a dead end and quite swamped with small not so unspeakable fantasies Sin.

If there were any doubts about the very personal setting of the project, they disappeared almost immediately by Vincent Cassel, whose partial discomfort with acting in English makes him perfect for the part of a man destroyed by pain, Cronenberg’s explicit alter ego (I am physically identical here, and as often happens with the director’s films, filming took place at close range from his home in Ontario). Diane Kruger, who replaced Léa Seydoux due to the latter’s other commitments, is the other side of the coin with the triple role of Becca, Terry, and Hunny, a group that allows the German actress, often underestimated in non-profit projects Europeans, to exhibit different layers of his interpretative versatility. She completes the main trio, as the antisocial Maury, an amused Guy Pearce.

If in the previous Crimes of the Future one sometimes had the impression that the director was plagiarising himself by recovering an old script, here one feels the harmony between Cronenberg and a different type of horror, more personal and autobiographical in more than one sense (before becoming a filmmaker he was interested in a career as a scientist, which is why that discipline tends to appear in his filmography). In some ways, the body horror in this down-to-earth version is even more painful and impactful, whereas the transformation itself has nothing sci-fi and is so real that it hurts. The farewell to his wife becomes a universal meditation on how we can (try to) move forward. And if in the case of Karsh, the reaction was nothing short of radical, for Cronenberg it is an artistic work not without defects (the thriller component, if we want to call it that, is a bit of a stretch), but crossed by a sincerity that goes straight to the heart. Exhibited under the shroud.

However, everything is suffocated by the preponderance of an inexplicable conspiracy thriller thread in which we limit ourselves to hearing many names of people and places mentioned but which we will never meet by email. A constant verbiage, which kills the rhythm and the atmosphere, is staged with a discreet poverty of ideas. Rarely does it go beyond the shot-reverse-shot, in general laziness that also affects the actors (although seeing Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger is still pleasant). In doing so the tone fluctuates too much and, above all, even when it veers towards comedy, both the timing and the usual wit of the Canadian author are completely missing. Of course, everything regarding the sex scenes works, after all, he has never failed to stage one in his career. But it would be enough to think of the banality with which the topic of artificial intelligence is treated or the almost total absence of design work and scenography to understand that something must have gone wrong. Or to understand that Cronenberg simply no longer exists. And certainly, after everything he has given us, we will not be here to exercise the right to complain any longer.

The Shrouds Review: The Words

At a certain point, the technological cemetery will be rebuilt and reactivated, and that image there, of a meadow with tombs equipped with screens that all light up together, the image that in another film would have been synonymous with concern for the future, in him it is full of hope. It is a crucial moment that brings together things that usually don’t fit together, that is, the end of everything (which we associate with tombs), and the fact that we can still have an interaction with the corpses. And for a moment, still, in that image, the illusion is created that what we have always thought, that is, that the body is an empty shell that remains after life has left it, is a wrong perspective. In The Shrouds, dead bodies are something we can relate to, that can say things, that must be searched for, that speak to us through technology.

The Shrouds Review: Failed Attempt to Deal With The Death Of David Cronenberg | Cannes 2024 - Filmyhype

Director: David Cronenberg

Date Created: 2024-05-23 17:03

Editor's Rating:
2.5

Pros

• The premise is in line with Cronenberg's cinema
• The actors are perfect for their respective roles
• The personal component is very powerful

Cons

• Those who prefer the bloodier Cronenberg may not be passionate about this story
• The thriller component falters a bit