Still grieving the loss of his wife, a technological entrepreneur (Vincent Cassel) finds what’s left of his world collapsing into a nightmare of sex, paranoia, and grief in David Cronenberg’s most personal film.
The Shrouds is the saddest movie David Cronenberg has ever made. It’s steeped in grief; the loss of the filmmaker’s wife Carolyn in 2017 is the engine that drives every scene, and his decision to style and groom star Vincent Cassel as his own doppelgänger brings the point home all the more powerfully.
Cassel plays Karsh, a technological entrepreneur still grieving the death of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) four years earlier. He has thrown himself into his work, devising technologically augmented burial shrouds that let loved ones watch their lost family members decompose. It’s the closest thing to being there with them — and no, it’s not for everyone. But when his wife’s plot is among several desecrated in an apparent act of vandalism, Karsh slips into a full-on crisis that expands to involve Becca’s lookalike sister, Terry (also Kruger), her ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce), and, eventually, Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the enigmatic wife of a dying Hungarian tycoon who wants to open one of Karsh’s cemeteries in Budapest. Is Karsh losing his mind, or is some strange web closing around him?
Though The Shrouds does call back to Cronenberg’s body of work — specifically Videodrome, Naked Lunch, and Crash — it’s its own thing, a film unlike any he’s ever done before. The Shrouds denies the audience anything but the experience of Cronenberg’s own grief. It’s a work of art, written on the decomposing bodies of its characters, exploring the horror of simple human fragility. And it’s made by a master.
Director. David Cronenberg, Elizabeth Saunders, Geoff Young, Jennifer Dale, Sandrine Holt
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