Movie Review: ‘The Shrouds’ | Moviefone

‘The Shrouds’ receives 7 out of 10 stars.

Opening in theaters April 18th is ‘The Shrouds,’ directed by David Cronenberg and starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders, Jennifer Dale, Eric Weinthal, and Jeff Yung.

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Initial Thoughts

Just as his 1979 horror classic ‘The Brood’ was partially the director’s outpouring of anger and frustration over a bitter divorce and custody battle, David Cronenberg’s latest movie, ‘The Shrouds,’ unleashes a torrent of grief – well, sort of — over the death of Cronenberg’s second wife, Carolyn Zeifman, who died in 2017 after 38 years of marriage. But while ‘The Brood’ embodied Cronenberg’s rage in the form of mutant children borne from a psychologically unstable spouse, ‘The Shrouds’ finds Cronenberg getting more personal than usual as only he can: with a chilly, dry-humored, eerie, and occasionally cringe-inducing meditation on death, loss, and, as one character says, “money, technology, politics, and religion.”

All four of those come into play over the course of Cronenberg’s slow-burn, almost excessively talky, but still provocative new film (his 23rd). While ‘The Shrouds’ offers up a late-career remix of a number of Cronenberg’s greatest hits – body horror, paranoia, the fusion of technology and flesh, and soulless corporate greed – it does so through a more intimate lens than usual. And even if it doesn’t all add up in the end, ‘The Shrouds’ is still an occasionally heady meditation on how we deal with mortality — and how we decide not to deal with it.

Story and Direction

With his spiky white hair, craggy face, and black sunglasses, Vincent Cassel’s Karsh Relikh (continuing a long tradition of Cronenberg protagonists with weird names) is a – pardon the expression – dead ringer for the director himself, making the film’s unsettling blurring of reality and fantasy even more obscured. A producer of “industrial videos” based in Toronto, Karsh is also the founder and owner of GraveTech, a new technology which allows the living to watch the decomposing bodies of their loved ones via a live feed from the radioactive wrapping (the “shroud”) placed around the body in its grave.

One can watch this decidedly morbid display on either the handy phone app or via a screen mounted directly on the deceased’s headstone in Karsh’s special cemetery, which is located directly behind an austere restaurant he also owns. For Karsh, GraveTech is more than a business: he has a feed directly into the grave of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger), watching her skeletal remains four years after her death even as she comes into him in dreams, pieces of her body missing from the cancer that ravaged her body.

Things begin to go off the rails for Karsh when the GraveTech cemetery is vandalized – including the grave of his wife – just as he is formulating plans to expand the franchise with an enigmatic European investor and his equally mysterious but alluring wife (Sandrine Holt). At the same time, Karsh engages in a dangerous sexual relationship with his wife’s twin sister, Terry (also Kruger), even as Terry’s ex-husband, the nerdy, unstable Maury (Guy Pearce) tries to help him figure out who’s hacking into GraveTech and who attacked the cemetery.

Set in a slightly surreal world that’s just a few minutes in the future from ours (with self-driving cars and A.I. assistants a prominent but accepted part of everyday life), ‘The Shrouds’ follows a very Cronenbergian template of presenting the viewer with several puzzling questions that are not necessarily answered by the end of the film. This – and the movie’s somewhat emotionally removed, cerebral, dialogue-heavy script – can be off-putting to novice viewers but are familiar aspects to longtime fans of this one-of-a-kind filmmaker.

Yet Cronenberg possibly takes it a step further this time: as his mental state seems to crumble and the lines of reality blur, the movie itself almost seems to decompose along with the bodies of the dead that Karsh’s GraveTech allows us to view. The structure of the film decays just like a corpse, leaving Karsh on a voyage to destinations unknown by the time the film ends.

All this is done with Cronenberg’s typical precision and flair, with not a shot or composition wasted and the stark world of the movie painted in lustrous black, gray, and chocolate tones. Although minimal compared to much of his early work, the traces of body horror here are as always uncomfortable and unsettling. If we had to quibble with anything, it’s a little disappointing that the images delivered via GraveTech seem more digital in nature than realistic – the corpses look more like AI-generated images than actual bodies.

Cast and Performances

Vincent Cassel has always been more of a character actor than a leading man, but he acquits himself well here as Karsh, a man with the financial and technological means to assuage his grief but not the emotional or psychological tools. His reserved demeanor makes Karsh difficult to access at first, but Cassel eventually and subtly expresses his anguish even if his methods of expressing it – like having sex with his dead wife’s sister – aren’t exactly empathetic.

Equally knotty is Guy Pearce as the sister’s ex-wife, Maury, who lives inside his own head when he’s not buried in a laptop screen. Maury is hopelessly awkward, socially inept, and both smart enough to connect certain dots yet naïve enough to allow himself to be played.

But the MVP of the film is without a doubt Diane Kruger, in not one, two, but three roles: she plays Becca, Karsh’s late wife, who’s glimpsed in flashbacks and dreams as cancer and surgery ravage and take apart her body; she’s also Terry, Becca’s more neurotic sister, who gets enmeshed in a strange, powerful attraction with Karsh that turns physical and blurs the lines of identity; and finally she is the voice of Hunny, Karsh’s initially helpful A.I. assistant who slowly turns more controlling and malevolent as Karsh’s paranoia becomes more entrenched. Kruger has been rather underrated throughout her career, but here she plays three distinct personalities in three very different forms of existence, yet somehow manages to make a psychological throughline for all three.

Final Thoughts

Despite its morbid subject matter, ‘The Shrouds’ is not a return to the all-out horror assault of early Cronenberg classics like ‘Shivers,’ ‘Scanners,’ or ‘The Fly.’ But it shares many themes that manifest through all of the director’s work, and in many ways should be catnip to his most devout fans. The limitations of the flesh, the creeping grip of technology over our lives and even souls, the hint of vast conspiracies happening just beyond our range of vision – they’re all here, filtered through a more personal lens than usual, yet suffused with Cronenberg’s trademark sense of mounting unease and seasoned with his deadpan humor, dry as the dust inside a coffin.

It doesn’t always make sense, and it may not end up in a place that feels completely satisfying, but ‘The Shrouds’ is still a thoughtful if sometimes ponderous examination of grief and paranoia in which you’re never quite sure what’s about to happen next…which sounds a lot like life itself.

What is the plot of ‘The Shrouds’?

Following the death of his wife, a tech entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) develops a technology that allows people to view the bodies of their departed loved ones as they decay in their graves. But Karsh’s plans for expansion are challenged by personal demons, vandalism, and a possible conspiracy.

Who is in the cast of ‘The Shrouds’?

• Vincent Cassel as Karsh Relikh
• Diane Kruger as Becca / Terry / Hunny
• Guy Pearce as Maury
• Sandrine Holt as Soo-Min Szabo
• Elizabeth Saunders as Gray Foner
• Jennifer Dale as Myrna Slotnik
• Eric Weinthal as Dr. Hofstra
• Jeff Yung as Dr. Rory Zhao

‘The Shrouds’ opens in theaters on April 18th. Photo: Sideshow and Janus Films 5.

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