QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM CANNES

Canadian master of body horror David Cronenberg abandoned the genre in 1999, with Existenz. Thankfully for his fans, he returned to what his does best two years ago with the Crimes of the Future, a terrifying movie about a performance artist carrying out surgeries bizarre enough to shock Josef Mengele. He had been dabbling with a lot more family-friendly sci-fi and crime thrillers for nearly a quarter of a century, with cleaner films such as A History of Violence (2005) and Cosmopolis (2012). In The Shrouds, Cronenberg attempts to take Crimes of the Future one step further, delivering a film with extreme operations, deformities, and unusually randy characters.

Karsh (Vincent Cassel) is the owner of a very unusual cemetery in Toronto (Cronenberg’s home town, and also where the majority of his early films take place). The novelty is that corpses aare wrapped in a shroud before being lowered into their permanent resting aplace . These shrouds are fitted with a technology called GraveTech, allowing the surviving relatives to monitor the decomposition of their loved ones in real time, just as all of us have always dreamed. The high-resolution images (complete with zooming and rotating options) are displayed on a screen just above each individual grave (replacing those unfashionable gravestones of yore), or on a mobile phone app. One of the corpses belongs to Karsh’s wife Becca (Diane Kruger), who died four years earrlier after succumbing to a very aggressive bone cancer. In fact, The Shrouds is Cronenberg’s way of purging his very own grief: the director lost his second wife Carolyn Zeifman in 2017, and has not remarried since.

The movie opens with Cronenberg’s morbid sense of humour. Karsh – a loveless and completely abstinent widower – goes on a blind date with a beautiful and elegant woman of around his age. They meet at the cemetery restaurant, only for Karsh to reveal that he owns both the burial sites and the hospitality side of the business. The dining area is surrounded by statues wrapped in the same shrouds as the people six feet under, in a very questionable marketing strategy. The Shroud of Turin emerges in the conversation, yet there is no evidence to suggest that Karsh possesses a God complex. In reality, he is quiet and shy, and created his business in order to the grief that was suffocating him after Becca’s tragic death. He then takes the woman to see the grave and indeed the images of Becca’s decomposing body. Not a good start for this promising romance. Perhaps understandably, Karsh’s perplexed suitress quickly vanishes off the face of the earth.

The linen cloth that may have wrapped Jesus Christ is not the only religious reference in this resolutely profane film. Becca refused to be buried because she was a Jew, and the Judaism requires that the body rots naturally (thus allowing time for the soul to depart unhurriedly and at its own accord). Cronenberg stems from a Jewish household.

A number of characters and subplots progressively attach themselves to the story. Half-Korean Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt) wishes to open a GraveTech cemetery in Hungary, but there is a possibility that she has connections with Russian spies. The Toronto cemetery is vandalised, and Karsh suspects that Chinese government stooges may use his humble business for surveillance purposes. Becca’s surviving sister Terry (also played by Kruger) becomes increasingly close to her brother-in-law (or maybe former “brother-in-law”? The film raises questions about in-law relations following an untimely passing). Maury (Guy Pearce) is both Terry’s husband and Karsh’s technology partner, and he is terrified that she may have a relationship with him. Karsh uses an avatar as a personal assistant, a koala-morphing blonde called Hunny (voiced by Kruger, in her third role in the movie). Becca’s doctor Jerry Eckler (Steve Switzman) also happens to be an old lover of his patient, and he may harbour a secret or two. Small tumours mysteriously mushroom all over Becca’s decomposing body, a bizarre development that more or less connects the various developments.

The Shrouds is a two-hour movie with so many layers and loose ends that it could well be called The Threads. There is no shortage of twists and turns, and many unanswered questions. The filmmaker is well aware of this, and toys with the very notion of conspiracy theories: Terry becomes uncontrollably aroused by the unsolved mysteries and their mooted resolutions. Her late sister Becca too was very horny.The flashback sequences reveal that she insisted in having sex with her husband even after her bones became brittle as chalk, and her body parts began to literally fall part, perhaps in a nod to the randy motorists of Cronenberg’s most controversial film Crash (1997). An overbloated ending does little to help confused viewers, even if it may make the sexually twisted Terry explode with pleasure. Neither a damp squib nor an orgasmic finale. Not Cronenberg’s finest work, either. And definitely inferior to 2022’s Crimes of the Future.

The Shrouds just premiered in the Official Competition of the 77th Cannes International Film Festival.