The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024)

The most straightforward Cronenberg film since A Dangerous Method (2011), The Shrouds tells a downright Oedipal tale of Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a wealthy businessman mourning the loss of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). With apparently bottomless reserves of capital, he founds GraveTech, a state-of-the-art graveyard that allows clients to monitor the decaying bodies of their loved ones. The bodies are wrapped in full-coverage shroud technology that facilitates close-up and 360 views of the deceased. One evening, a select number of graves are vandalized, including Becca's, and Kash's IT guy Maury (Guy Pearce), who is unhappily divorced from Becca's sister Terry (also Kruger), eventually regains access to the grave feeds. But he discovers nodes growing on some of the bones (again, including Becca's), nodes that may be surveillance devices. This wrinkle plunges Vincent into a maelstrom of conspiracies and he spends the second half of the film wondering who to trust, even his sexy AI avatar assistant Hunny (also Kruger). 

However convoluted all of that sounds, Cronenberg drops not a single spinning plate over 119 minutes, apart perhaps from a few awkward dream vs. reality moments. In fact, as with Twisters, of all things, I honestly thought there was an hour left to go as the final credits started to roll. But that left an empty feeling that might not work in the film's favor. I kept longing for some pushback from the women characters akin to an early scene in which a first date, Myrna Slotnik (Jennifer Dale), at GraveTech doesn't go too well; in classic feminist film theory mode, Myra makes it clear to Karsh that she does not want to look at Becca's decaying body on the GraveTech monitor. And Kruger's sex-which-is-not-one characters are not so much foils as enigmas helping Karsh speed along his oedipal path towards knowledge. 

Then again, maybe a bit of emptiness is what Cronenberg was after. Karsh is an obvious stand-in for Cronenberg who lost his wife Carolyn to cancer in 2017. He presents himself as a husk incapable of believing that someone so vibrant and alive as Becca (or really anyone?) can just be gone one moment and then spend eternity rotting away. And when confronted with larger, inconceivable structures of political intrigue that generate conspiracy theories, as Karsh must do, perhaps a modicum of emptiness serves as a necessary component of mental health, keeping cynicism, nihilism, and madness at bay.

Grade: A-minus