The Canadian talks about death and mourning in a mysterious, enigmatic film, elusive to the point of evanescence. The review of The Shrouds by Federico Gironi.
There is Vincent Cassel which is clearly made up and wigded like David Cronenberg himself, as Karsh, a mysterious industrial film producer who is also the owner of a cemetery and the inventor of a new technology. Wrapping the corpses in ultra-technological shrouds and equipped with strange microcameras, the survivors of their loved ones can see the process of decomposition of the body on special screens placed on the tombstones. Karsh, who has not yet overcome the mourning of the death of his wife Rebecca, which occurred four years before him, is one of those who use this technology to always remain close to the woman he loved and still loves. Then there’s Diane Kruger in the role of Terry, the almost twin sister of Karsh’s dead wife who is passionate about conspiracies and conspiracy theories, and her ex-husband Guy Pierce, a hacker on the verge of a nervous breakdown who has never accepted being been dumped.
When someone vandalizes the Karsh techno-cemetery, destroying monitors and connections, the questions multiply: are there Icelandic environmental activists who oppose the idea of a technological cemetery near Reykjavik? Or the Hungarian-born tycoon who wants to invest in the project and use Karsh’s technology near Budapest? Did the Chinese have anything to do with Karsh’s collaboration? Or perhaps the oncologist who treated Rebecca, incidentally also an ex of hers, of whom Karsh was jealous? And what are those strange formations that Karsh notices on the bones of his dead wife through the monitors before they were damaged?
To say that the plot of The Shrouds is mysterious and labyrinthine is an understatement. But the impression is that Cronenberg wanted precisely this. The slide of his alter-ego into a spiral of paranoia and conspiracy theories, his disorientation, are functional to the discourse he seems to want to carry forward, which is simply – so to speak – a speech on death and mourning.
The Canadian stated it clearly: the idea for this film came to him while he was mourning the death of his wife. It is a project that he defined as autobiographical, and very personal, and the impression is that it is so from several points of view. Not only does it make Cassel a sort of twin of him, but it condenses (again!) inside The Shrouds all his cinematic obsessions: the body, obviously, also and above all as a place of sexual desire and its physical explicitation, but also the perversions of sex, the mutations of the flesh (whether alive or dead), paranoia, deviant trajectories and deviants of feeling.
What is clear is that throughout the film, as he struggles to understand what is happening around him, who is lying and who is not, as he comes to terms with dreams/hallucinations about his wife, her body, her body mutilated by illness and treatment, Karsh will be able to process his mourning in some strange way.
Through immersion in this strange, liquid nightmare, in this strange form of detection which seems to see him in the role of the involuntary detective, but also through the meeting with two female figures – without saying anything else – who will initiate him into sex again, leading him paradoxically to a closer contact with the deceased Becca.
Dark, as well as mysterious, with a darkness that contrasts with the exaggerated clarity of the digital image which seems to equate the living characters with the deceased ones, made up of words as much as of images, devoid of the visionary nature of a past that only returns in the shots in its most obvious version, The Shrouds seems like an almost testamentary film in its declared desire for abstraction, to be synthetic, conceptual, elusive and even evanescent.
In The Shrouds, never like before, Cronenberg places side by side and overlaps life and death, flesh and spirit, blurring both dimensions in a binary reality that is easy to hack, modify, disguise, evade. Also because never before, perhaps as never happened before, Cronenberg also seems to question his faith in technology and its subversive potential.
There is nothing left to do but abandon yourself to the enigma of the film, to its shiny surface, to the shadows it hides. Also because, beyond these shadows, there isn’t much else behind the film and Cronenberg’s personal journey of grieving.
