A grave use of technology in The Shrouds
Chris Forrester digs into David Cronenberg’s latest work, a fascinating and rich meditation on loss, the digital age, and more.
Where on release, David Cronenberg’s superlative Crimes of the Future (2022), about a network of scientist-performance artists facing a need to reckon with man’s legacy of plastic waste by way of not-quite-understood biological changes, was ostensibly about a world to come, in the three (all too long) years since, it has already taken on an eerie feeling of post facto prescience. The accumulation of microplastics in human organ systems (and particularly the brain) has increased drastically, so-described-as revolutionary politics feel more apt to safeguard the future of human civilization, and all has become strange and overwhelming in a way that feels resonant with Cronenberg’s peculiar tone of wry humor, stiff earnestness, and omnipresent carnality (though, sadly, surgery is still not the new sex). Enter Cronenberg’s new film The Shrouds, which does away with its predecessor’s temporal qualifiers in both name and narrative context to occupy a world that feels at once dystopic and contemporary, as gleaming and tech-addled as Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002) or an episode of Black Mirror (to invoke a much lousier and more obvious piece of techno-anxiety sci-fi) and despairingly familiar as the world just outside the cinema. The future, it seems, is now, and for what may be the final world in one of genre cinema’s all-time great bodies of work, David Cronenberg has captured the strange loneliness of living it.
Following the death of his wife of nearly 40 years in 2017, the ever-imaginative writer-director fashioned a concept among his most deliciously macabre — a technology that allows the bereaved to observe the decaying corpses of their deceased by way of digitally rendered MRI imagery enabled by specially designed burial shrouds and accessed via a smartphone app — and placed it at the center of a techno-thriller about their inventor, a conspicuously Cronenberg-looking Vincent Cassel (as Karsh) himself grief-stricken over the recent passing of his wife, investigating an international conspiracy involving the ransacking of his first GraveTech graveyard. Unfamiliar with the style of Cronenberg’s more recent outings (in addition to the aforementioned, the searingly sarcastic Maps to the Stars [2014], the barren and alienating Cosmopolis [2012], and the deceptively slippery crime dramas A History of Violence [2005] and Eastern Promises [2007] are high points), one might expect another grotesque exercise in body horror in the vein of The Brood (1979), Videodrome (1983), or The Fly (1986) and replete with the kind of fleshy practical effects that gave his early work much of its iconography. But the Cronenberg of now is hardly the Cronenberg of then, and though ostensibly the self-portrait of a grieving artist and ostensibly a cyber-espionage thriller, you’d be hard pressed to identify much about The Shrouds that’s especially thrilling or sad.
A high-tech burial shroud in The Shrouds
Rather, in the slippery, genre-defying tradition of the director’s post-’90s spate of works, here is another tonally opaque, challenging film centered on transformations of a less corporeal sort, and a major achievement in finding the soul (or lack thereof) of the moment to boot. As the more metaphorical shroud of death separates the bereaved from their loved ones, so too does the titular device distance one world from another. In spite of the almost discomfiting closeness offered by the ability to observe a loved one’s decaying body, the process is entirely digital, with screens as a sort of digital spirit board allowing communion with the dead. The visualizations offered by GraveTech are intricately detailed 3D models created by MRI — nearly photorealistic, but markedly digital to an uncanny degree — and accessed with an app. The technology is first shown in action in the graveyard, as Karsh demonstrates his invention to a stunned woman with whom he’s been set up on a blind date and who, unsurprisingly, he won’t see again, but we’re also told that GraveTech’s scans are viewable from anywhere one carries a screen. The act of grieving thus becomes both abstract and omnipresent, dispersed so far and wide beyond the familiar site of the graveyard as to become everything and nothing at the same time.
The film that depicts this omnipresent grief occupies a similar register; it evinces a deep loneliness without offering many concentrated moments of feeling, a loneliness specific to the unreality of the digital world. Just as screens make concrete a barrier between life and death, their omnipresence surrounds the characters with barriers from one another. In unspooling the conspiracy of his graveyard’s defiling (of consequence: in the ransacking of a digital graveyard, grave robbery looks more like wiretapping than bodysnatching), Karsh is surrounded as often by a handful of people physically present in his life (his late wife’s sister Terry, his coder Maury, a doctor he consults to examine strange protrusions that appear on the scan of his wife’s body, employees of his company, the wife of a prospective sponsor with whom he develops a sexual relationship) as by those he communicates with by screen and one who exists only onscreen, an AI assistant named Hunny (and voiced by Diane Kruger, who plays both Karsh’s late wife and her sister).
Frames within frames within frames in The Shrouds
The Shrouds is arrestingly successful as a portrait of digital age grief, with characters surrounded by but distanced from a world they’re largely only connected to via technology. And applying the same style of formal rigor mortis that lent a tone of stiff off-kilterness to the highlights of his late period, Cronenberg proves adept at visualizing that world with striking clarity. The film’s images are for the most part elegant and economical, moody and emotive only when needed and effectively straightforward in their approach to capturing contemporary screen economies. For all the talk of smartphones as uncinematic or grating presences in the movies for the inherent difficulty of visualizing their usage, The Shrouds achieves a remarkable amount by just photographing their usage matter-of-factly. Here, there are no onscreen text bubbles or other formal gimmicks to accentuate the stimulation of screen usage; screens are simply a constant presence in our world, and they become a part of Cronenberg’s visual language as frames-within-frames whose constant appearances highlight the isolation of the moment.
Likewise, Karsh spends a good deal of time speaking via screen with his AI assistant Hunny (the most fearless and likely alienating of Cronenberg’s gestures here, and a stellar encapsulation of the simultaneous total normality and total absurdity of much of the digital world), a blonde BitMoji looking animated character who at times turns into a Koala bear for his comfort, and cruising around on autopilot in his Tesla. Much of his action in the film is rather passive and anti-cinematic, with would-be dramatic plot turns unspooling over FaceTime calls, conversations with Hunny, behind the wheel of his car, or sometimes multiple of those locales at once. The effect of this might feel deflating were it not for the perfect dose of emptiness it instills the film with, and the sharp contrast it offers to the opposing presence of a longtime Cronenbergian fascination: sex.
A haunting flashback in The Shrouds
For a man whose wife is so fresh in the ground that he’s still discovering new details in her rotting bones, Karsh has a lot of sex, made all the more amusing for his striking likeness to Cronenberg himself. The grief of The Shrouds is as much emotional as it is physical, and through both a series of bedroom flashbacks of Karsh’s ailing wife as she undergoes various amputative surgeries (among them one of the more visceral shocks in any of the director’s often squirm-inducing films) and increasingly frequent sexual encounters with the women of his present, the film explores an oft-ignored facet of romantic bereavement: the absence of a body shared so frequently that its loss feels almost like an injury to one’s own. Here, there is both a very immediate tenderness — “Will your bones break if I hold you?” Karsh asks his fragile Becca — and a prickling horniness that lends needed corporeality to the otherwise ghostly feeling of grief that swirls through the film’s lonely, hypermodern spaces.
Present-day Toronto offers an appropriately sterile backdrop of glass-windowed high-rises that evokes the foreboding “the future is now” location work of Godard’s Alphaville (1965) and offers a depressingly modern complement to the seedy Toronto of Videodrome (an inevitable reference point, given Karsh’s background as an industrial video producer). As if intentionally devoid of any distinctive architectural character or aesthetic uniqueness, it feels like an extension of the textureless digital spaces that dominate so much of the characters’ lives — as drably sleek as a modern computer monitor or smartphone and as uncannily smooth as a digitally rendered corpse.
Karsh shows off a 3D corpse rendering of his late wife using his GraveTech technology
Fittingly, the espionage plot that ought to give the film its pulse is similarly indistinct. Absent any of the familiar hallmarks of the detective or technothriller genres, it offers a labyrinth through which Karsh can obsessively, desperately search for meaning, but one that provides few satisfying answers. The plot is almost a red herring — as much for him as for us — in search of which the unshakeable loneliness of a hypermediated world starts to set in. The closest Karsh comes to concrete resolution is in the unearthing of the desecrated bodies, when inspection of Becca’s bones might determine if the digitally-observed bone spurs that catalyzed his investigation are indeed physically present or not, but he chooses (and we can infer why) not to see her corpse, and so the mystery remains. Whether or not there’s any resolution is hardly the point; that its absence is the consequence of both unchecked grief and the all-encompassing intangibility of a world enshrouded in the digital is far more significant.
Amidst such unreality and impermanence, the film takes on an unshakeable feeling of ghostliness. Like Olivier Assayas’s masterful digital-age ghost story Personal Shopper (2016), The Shrouds is an essential horror text for the loneliness of its moment, and a fiercely individualistic study of grief. The deceptive simplicity of its piercingly anticlimactic mystery reveals on subsequent watches a deeper and deeper melancholy that only amplifies its ambiguity. What to make of the Vertigo-esque doubling (tripling? quadrupling?) of avatars for Karsh’s wife? The certainty that GraveTech’s digital renderings will far outlast the final traces of the people who shaped them? Whatever non-answers the text of the film may provide, its perfectly shaped impression of life (and death) in a world of lonely impermanence and computerized unreality is hard to shake; the only eternal togetherness lies beneath the cold, hard earth.
David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds screens this Saturday, May 3, at 7pm as part of the series New Americas Cinema.