David Cronenberg’s films have always been fascinated with decay — the decay of living human flesh in The Fly, of middle-America morality in A History of Violence, of the boundaries between reality and simulation in Videodrome and eXistenZ. His latest, The Shrouds, is about literal decomposition, a deadpan satire about the commodification of death that’s also a cerebral, sometimes impenetrable story about the unexpected manifestations of grief. This movie is as icy and airless as a tomb, but it has twinkles of mordant humor that stop us short.
Cronenberg wrote the film after his wife Carolyn’s death, making this perhaps his most nakedly personal work since 1979’s The Brood, a bludgeoning allegory about parentage made in the wake of a divorce and custody battle. As if to confirm our suspicions, Cronenberg has even styled his leading man (Vincent Cassel, with his tight silver coiffure and eagle-like features) to look uncannily like himself. “You’ve made a career out of bodies,” Cassel’s character is told at one point, which Cronenberg has no doubt heard a million times in his own life.
Cassel plays a tech mogul called Karsh, which is a distinctly Cronenbergian name: dissonant and synthetic-sounding. He has developed burial shrouds equipped with high-resolution lenses, which allow the living to, through an app called GraveTech, tap directly into the camera feed and check on their dead loved one’s current state of decomposition. It’s a labor of love for Karsh, whose wife Becca is buried in his so-called “prototype cemetery,” an empty plot for himself next to her.
Becca haunts Karsh in several forms, all of them played by Diane Kruger: as her nearly identical sister Terry; as an A.I. assistant who has been programmed to look and sound like her; and in his dreams, where she appears naked and increasingly mutilated by disease. In justifying his morbid technology, Karsh explains that it’s merely a logical extension of the theory that the soul clings to the body after death. And Karsh only seems to relate to Becca as a body: his fantasies of her are physical, sexual; a digital picture frame on his desk scrolls through images not of their life together but of her decaying corpse in its casket.
This is a fairly staggering bit of auto-criticism on Cronenberg’s part, because the main knock on his work is that he treats his characters merely as vessels for organs, viscera and weird kinks. In The Shrouds, however, the people are distracted by a series of increasingly impossible conspiracy theories.
The characters are pulled into these screwy plots, and they’re unexpectedly titillated by them. Cronenberg seems to understand how ridiculous it all is — and how sad, because the film’s central mystery is ultimately, deliberately fruitless. The characters wander around in a fugue state, and the possibility of a grand conspiracy snaps them out of it. It’s a coping mechanism, a way for them to find order and control.
I was disappointed by The Shrouds the first time I saw it, but it revealed more of itself to me the second time, and I’m now more sympathetic to what Cronenberg is trying to say — and what he’s working through. Death is a biological, inescapable fact. Grief, meanwhile, is mercurial, unpredictable. One’s a period, the other’s an ellipsis.
Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101” heard Friday evenings at 6:30 here on KPBX.