COLUMN: Art in its Own Terms #2, "Unfit for Burial"
Dmitry Samarov on David Cronenberg in general and his movie The Shrouds (2024) in particular.
A new movie by David Cronenberg is always an event to me. To begin with, there are not that many of them considering his nearly sixty years behind the camera. Then, also, how many more will he make? In recent years, he’s had trouble getting his projects funded and he’s in his eighties, so time is running out. It’s late days both for Cronenberg and for the medium he’s devoted his life to.
I bike through a thunderstorm to make the matinee show of The Shrouds at the Music Box Theatre and arrive soaked as a drowned rat.
There is a term that has become synonymous with Cronenberg and the genre of film he’s often slotted into. While whoever coined it was onto something—a cliché is a cliché because it’s true—this label has been used to the point of losing any valence. Not unlike played-out commonplaces like hipster or woke, this kind of rubric becomes a dismissive reduction at best, an insulting slur at worst. Cronenberg himself is on record as not being a fan of the term, so I will try not to even use its two constituent words; which is a challenge, since, without them, many direct descriptions might become oblique or needlessly ornate. This is a constraint that feels appropriate when discussing an artist who’s been boxed into a genre that has rarely given him the kind of respect and acclaim that his industry values most when celebrating itself in this country. It’s doubtful the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will honor the man with one of their figurines. Let’s hope they don’t leave him out of their annual death scroll once his bell tolls. They’ve done that many times to legends of the form.
David Cronenberg uses human and sometimes alien organs and appendages to evoke grand ideas and unanswerable questions. He makes visible and palpable concepts and feelings that might seem unfilmable on paper. Whether working from original material or adapting the writing of others, he has a knack for forcing the internal (and often, innards) out into the light for all to see.
In his first proper feature—Shivers (1975)—a Montreal apartment building is infested with parasites that pass from one resident to another during sex. Cronenberg codifies a tone that marries visceral revulsion to mordant humor that will run through much of his filmography. What makes this movie still resonate fifty years after its release is that Cronenberg found a way to externalize an elemental fear—STDs in this case—and make it both funny and gross in ways that are hard to forget. A friend calls this one Sex Worms, which sums it up but is much too blunt for a sophisticate like Cronenberg, because, though he’s typically lumped in with directors who go for low-hanging fruit, his aims always reach for rarer realms.
He has a way of paring a theme to its starkest core, then drilling down till its life blood drains out slowly. eXistenZ (1999) anticipates the all-consuming quality of online life, The Brood (1979) imagines the worst fantasies of a divorcing man fulfilled, Dead Ringers (1988) shows how a brilliant mind will eventually consume itself, especially one split in two, and Crash (1996) illustrates an endpoint to our romance with the automobile. These and several others are movies I’ve returned to again and again. Like all great art, they gain gravity and resonance each time I experience them.
In The Shrouds, Vincent Cassel plays a man so consumed by the grief of his wife’s passing that he invents a technology that will allow him (and others willing to pay premium fees) to watch their loved ones’ corpses decompose in the earth after their passing. An app on their smartphone grants them access to cam footage and animated imaging of their relations’ rotting remains from every angle any time they want to wallow. In a memorably awful first date, Cassel’s Karsh treats a woman to a meal at a restaurant in a cemetery, then invites her to stroll outside and view his dead wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), in her current state on a monitor installed into her gravestone. The woman sticks around longer than absolutely necessary but is never heard from again. Clearly, Karsh will need to find a dating app for himself that satisfies some very specific parameters. Luckily for him, he has a virtual assistant named Hunny (voiced by Kruger), who is on the case. Hunny was created for Karsh by his former brother-in-law Maury (a badly miscast Guy Pearce), a paranoid tech wiz who’s estranged and divorced from Becca’s sister, Terry (also Kruger). When Karsh’s Gravetech Cemetery is vandalized and the crypt app is hacked, locking the grievers out of their chance to keep reveling in their misery, Karsh and his deeply dysfunctional chosen family go on a wild goose chase to find the culprits and discover the motive behind the desecration.
As with almost every Cronenberg film, the initial premise is intriguing and repugnant in roughly equal measure. It’s a story of someone who doesn’t want to move on after a very common human tragedy, then goes to absurd extremes to maintain an illusion he thinks he can’t live without. Unlike in his more successful films, The Shrouds cannot maintain the poker-faced commitment to an idea and instead dissolves into a series of flailing dead ends, as Karsh fails to understand either who or what has it in for him or why he is doing what he’s doing. The descent into madness is a leitmotif in many of the director’s movies—most memorably in Dead Ringers (1988), a film whose theme of opposing twins is echoed to diminishing effect in The Shrouds as well—but unlike Cronenberg’s previous alter egos, Karsh just seems to be grasping at straws. The idea of someone unable to move on from a soulmate is a potentially rich one to explore but the character Cronenberg has created continually does things that defy any internal logic. A story can fly off in any direction so long as the players act in ways that are true to themselves. Then we can go anywhere with them. But if they constantly break character, a viewer is left checking his watch rather than losing himself in the story. There’s a scene, for instance, about three-quarters of the way in, where Karsh tries on one of the titular shrouds for the first time. Hunny quickly appears on a nearby monitor to remind him that these are not garments for the living. Wouldn’t that be one of the first things an inventor of a technology would do while developing said technology? We’re asked to believe the man waits four years after his wife’s death and internment to try on the thing he made that will allow him to remain near her forever. Similarly, his relationship with Terry turns from friend to lover on a dime, after he’s repeated to himself and anyone who will listen that Becca asked him on her deathbed to stay away from her sister. I’m not saying that circumstances and feelings can’t change, but in the compressed timeframe of this story—it takes place over perhaps a few weeks—these kinds cataclysmic reversals strain credulity and approach non sequitur.
There’s a sentimentality to The Shrouds that is rarely evident in Cronenberg’s previous films. Likely this is due to the story being inspired by the death of his own wife. It’s difficult for his cool, clinical aesthetic to withstand that kind of existential sorrow. This is understandable on a human level but true pain doesn’t always result in true art.
The most disappointing thing about The Shrouds is its take on current technology. Cronenberg has often taken advances, in medicine especially, as a driving theme, but here he comes off as an old man shaking his withered fist at a world passing him by. The speculation about Chinese and Russian conspiracies allegedly behind Karsh’s difficulties, though often spoken by the paranoid Maury, feel like they’re coming from the author himself. It’s like those awful emails with links no one in their right mind opens, sent by well-meaning but confused parents or grandparents. Their hearts are in the right place but they’ve fallen for bait even though they don’t realize they’re in the water. The idea of the president of a tech company not even considering that a digital avatar might not have his best interests in mind is just not believable. Maybe Cronenberg is trying to say Karsh is in such a fog of grief that he can’t tell up from down but then how did he manage to create a whole new business out of his sorrow and continue to grow it and expand such that he’s courting investors who want to franchise it all over the planet? Either he’s a catatonic basket case or a ruthless captain of industry. Here you might argue, given current political realities, that the two coexisting side by side are eminently plausible, but they are not so in the story logic that Cronenberg has set up.
One of the key differences between art and life is that art needs constraints and set structure in order to flourish. Life is all middles someone wise once said but a narrative film is not. It has to have a beginning, middle, and end. Those are the rules of the game. In addition to some of its other flaws, The Shrouds has no ending. It has that in common with its far superior predecessor, Crimes of the Future (2022). When that film ended I wanted it to go on another hour or two, but when Karsh flies off to Hungary with the wife of a potential investor in his cemetery scheme (a beautiful blind woman he’s also sleeping with— tangent that doesn’t really go anywhere), I wondered why I’d sat through the previous two hours.
A good piece of art has an inevitability. You don’t question plot points or details because it moves of its own volition. You may not understand it, it may not correspond to anything you know from everyday life, but its truth is beyond question. It functions on its own terms. I know a thing is not working when I start wondering about this part or that part which doesn’t fit. A bad wig, for instance, can completely pierce the suspension of disbelief needed to make the magic work. The Shrouds is littered with things that don’t fit. The middling CGI used to render Becca’s amputations pales in comparison to the make-up and practical effects Cronenberg typically uses to render the mutations endemic throughout his oeuvre. The cutesy Hunny avatar feels like she was cut-and-pasted from generic children’s fare. Maybe Cronenberg thought this non-threatening image might enhance the sinister motivations she may or may not represent but the effect is the same hollow feeling we get looking at any of the corporate branding we’re constantly exposed to on any available screen. The message that many of the things allegedly created to help us are actually hurting us is a truism that a true artist like Cronenberg shouldn’t stoop to saying out loud the way he does here.
My hat, scarf, and flannel shirt are still damp from the rain-soaked ride as I exit the theater. I’m standing there stewing over what I just saw when a friend I hadn’t seen or spoken to in eight years appears on the sidewalk. We catch up as I shiver to get warm. It’s as improbable a development as anything in The Shrouds but doesn’t have the burden of belonging within a flawed narrative. It’s a small episode from life that doesn’t need to fit a story arc, though it might become a part of something bigger if she and I see one another again.
I listen to Cronenberg talk on Marc Maron’s podcast a couple days after seeing The Shrouds. His explanation of the choices he made are persuasive but they don’t match what I recall seeing onscreen. It’s sort of like depending on the wall label to know what to think of a painting. The thing has to speak for itself. Nevertheless, I decide to give it another chance.
This time the weather’s ideal but the film is much worse knowing what’s coming. With added insights from the director fresh in mind, the flaws become that much more glaring. Cronenberg said Cassel was nervous about saying so many lines in English, which the Frenchman had never been asked to do. The result is an uncharacteristically tentative performance from an actor known for brashness and flair. Kruger doesn’t fare much better. They both seem kind of lost because Cronenberg has not lit their path to show the way. It’s like pulling on a thread and unravelling the entire garment.
Even a master tailor can muff the stitching, bloody himself with the needle, throw the whole mess down on the floor, then walk away. I hope The Shrouds is not Cronenberg’s final statement. The fact it is consumed with death and burial and endings signals that it as a coda, but this great artist deserves a better finale. The past few years have been an extended funeral for the medium of film. It’s become a niche hobby like record collecting. That may not necessarily be a bad thing. After all, the advent of photography didn’t kill painting (though it keeps trying even after its own demise.) I just selfishly want one of the great filmmakers of my lifetime to go out on a high note. The Shrouds is one of his lowest.