David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds & the All Consuming Force of the Digital

David Cronenberg’s career has been one marked by various distinct artistic periods, from his early body horror classics: The Brood (1979) , Scanners (1981), The Fly (1986), to his string of prestige literary adaptations: Dead Ringers (1988), M. Butterfly, (1993), Crash (1996). He is an artist that has gracefully been able to navigate the market, responding to the changing tastes of studios and audiences whilst never compromising his artistic voice. However, with Crimes of the Future (2019) a new late period had begun for Cronenberg, one more explicitly outside a commercial realm, operating with smaller budgets raised through an influx of foreign money and a devoted bench of character actors. Between Crimes of the Future and now The Shrouds (2024) what this new period appears to be defined by is age. At 81 Cronenberg seems to be turning inward, thinking about death and thinking about the future that awaits once he departs. In the same manner his films have taken an elegiac bent, with Karsh (Vincent Cassel), the enterprising inventor of the titular shrouds styled (in full Saint Laurent courtesy of Saint Laurent Productions) to resemble Cronenberg himself, haunted by the death of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger), a detail plucked directly from the auteur’s own life. While Crimes of the Future took place within the degraded landscapes of modern Athens The Shrouds returns Cronenberg to his native Toronto, though a pervasive sense of dread and decay still remains. Reteaming with cinematographer Douglas Koch, Cronenberg progresses the visual aesthetic of Crimes of the Future, of low light, high contrast and heavy shadows akin to the paintings of Carravaggio. In the film’s most haunting passages the crevices of Cassel’s face appear sculpted by light, exposing an evocative wear and tear that consumes the film.

There is a common tendency to pigeonhole Cronenberg within the genre of body horror when in actuality the larger thread within his work is one concerning dysmorphia and distortion both physical and mental. Yes, The Fly (1986) is concerned with Jeff Goldblum’s physical transformation though equally important is his slip from sanity. In their own distinct ways both body and mind can shape reality. This dividing line in Cronenberg’s work, between body horror and non-body horror can be even further subdivided, into films that directly concern physical transformation and films where the body horror elements are merely mental projections and hallucinations. Perhaps Crimes of the Future, was Cronenberg’s final say on the prior (in my eyes you cannot reach a conclusion more moving than that picture) reckoning with the various challenges facing human development and responding with a state of euphoria discovered within the change (a declaration that has come to resonate with the Trans community). On the flipside, The Shrouds may very well be Cronenberg’s final say on mental distortion, returning once more to the theoretical framework of Videodrome (1983). While Videodrome traced the relationship between the human psyche and the burgeoning medium of video, concerning how the replication of reality can come to distort reality itself, The Shrouds tackles our contemporary relationship to the all encompassing force of the digital. The world of The Shrouds is very much the world of today, with Karsh constantly on his iPhone and in his Tesla surrounded by screens which mediate the experience of living. In a very powerful manner the qualities of the digital come to stand in as a metaphor for Karsh’s grief, as a medium that lacks any physical dimension and which only reveals a profound hollowness the more you try and find any sort of center. Karsh’s own grief finds itself within the chasm of the digital, trying and failing to fill the void, being seduced by the promise of non-physical permanence which comes at the tradeoff of tactility. In one of the film’s most affecting scenes Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the wife of an investor to be, insists on touching Karsh’s face, an act met with resistance and later surrender. Consumed by grief Karsh instead invests his time in his personal AI assistant Honey, a digital homunculus in the visage of his deceased wife and in the shrouds themselves, which allow users to monitor the real time decay of their loved ones’ corpses. Within the live streams of graves one finds a perverse line from the origins of the moving image. If the medium of photography was intended to create a physical, veritable trace of human experience, then the logical endpoint would be a never ending real time image beyond life. Though one that only serves to further fuel anguish and obsession and which can be digitally manipulated.

In the same manner as grief the digital appears elusive, and it is in this gap, between comprehension and desire, that one finds themselves turning to conspiracy in order to attempt to make sense of the unknown. The film’s narrative finds Karsh tracing a scheme involving the vandalism of several of his own Grave Tech headstones, though a search that comes to resemble the winding, never-ending rabbit hole of Videodrome and eXistenZ (1999), looping in a jealous software engineer brother in law Maury (Guy Pearce) and the accusation of Chinese hacking. Though ultimately none of this actually matters with the conspiracy serving as a distraction for the void that exists within Karsh, as a way to bargain with a life that cruelly gives and takes without reason. (with so many of this year’s competition films I want to invoke Antonioni, but truthfully, if you think about it, everything in life is Antonioni)

Amongst digitally distorted images, hacked intel and shady medical records Karsh can only find solace in the physical. Characteristic of Cronenberg sex becomes a central tenet, psychological fixation and ultimately a healing force in The Shrouds. It is only in making himself physically vulnerable that Karsh grants himself the opportunity to live a renewed life in his relationship with Soo-Min, though sex is also used to conjure the ghost of Becca. In diving into the depths of male anguish and desire Cronenberg defers to the foundational text of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) with Karsh striking up a relationship with Becca’s twin sister. At every passage grief distorts psychologically: it warps need, it creates new impulses and it causes one to spin narratives in an effort to cope. Despite Cassel’s imperfect English his performance as Karsh appears equal parts tortured and tender, speaking in a hushed tone, appearing fully withdrawn into himself. It is in passages of mournful silence that the character fully comes to life. In keeping with the style of performance honed within his modern films Cronenberg favors stilted line delivery and dead eyed expressions, those which appear alienating but reveal an uncomfortable depth of meaning. Every character in the film is so caught within their own individual realities that everything they express, at least to them, appears self-evident in a way that prevents the need for discernable emotion. It is only in moments of extreme desperation, that both Karsh and Maury face does the facade break and we see their mangled, bleeding hearts on full display.

In spite of the solace one finds in the physical, the allure of the digital still remains because of the fragility of the body. Without reason it rots, it decays and destructs, a journey echoed through Becca’s struggle with cancer. In the film’s most moving scene (and what will likely be the most moving scene of the festival) Becca enters the bedroom post amputation as Karsh literally witnesses her disappearing right in front of him and even as he tries to hold her she only crumbles further. It is so easy to see why one would be seduced by the impermanence of the digital, that within the formlessness we can transcend physical boundaries and find global connection through networks. Though as explored in The Shrouds more often than not the digital acts as a front for clandestine corporate interests and surveillance. Regardless, even from a purely conceptual level you never can fully give yourself over and expect something in return from something you cannot actually see or hold. As much as we can turn to conspiracy and to the digital, and as much as we can try to find meaning in the meaningless, to find form in the formless, but nothing can come close to feeling the warmth of another body.