The films of David Cronenberg have long been preoccupied with the decay of human flesh. His oeuvre is wrapped in the inherent entropy of human existence and the inevitable death and bodily mutilation that awaits us all. Though his films have often centered the modernist idea of characters trying to transcend the natural world and escape their physical form, he has blended those modernist principles with postmodern concepts of hyperreality that defined his early classics like Videodrome and Scanners.
The allegories in Cronenberg’s films are usually broad and inspire a wide variety of interpretations. When his last film Crimes of the Future inspired allegorical readings from the trans community, Cronenberg responded that “he wasn’t thinking of that specifically” when he wrote the film 20 years prior, but “this is always a go around about who controls the bodies of the citizens.” He was similarly surprised but empathetic when audiences likened The Fly to the AIDS epidemic. Cronenberg has many imitators, including The Substance which premiered just a day before The Shrouds at Cannes, and they often miss this crucial part of his films; forgoing the nuance and elusiveness that makes Cronenberg such a master of body horror.
Although Cronenberg’s newest film The Shrouds is also layered and dealing with many big ideas, including many of the bodily fascinations that have always been on his mind, there is an unmistakable throughline of personal storytelling and grief that permeates the film. Cronenberg himself said “It’s a very personal project for me. People who know me will know parts of it are autobiographical.” The film is heavily influenced by the passing of Cronenberg’s wife from breast cancer in 2017, expanding on the body horror he explored in a 2013 short film called The Nest where a woman believes there are parasitic insects in her breasts. The Shrouds follows a businessman named Karsh who builds high tech burial shrouds allowing grievers to watch their loved ones in the grave.
The film opens with Karsh, who is also a widower and played by Vincent Cassell in David Cronenberg cosplay, sitting in a dentist chair being treated for a toothache. According to his dentist the teeth carry grief, and the grieving widower can quite literally feel the pain of his wife’s passing in his bones. After a scene featuring one of the most hilariously awkward first dates ever committed to screen, we learn that Karsh’s own deceased wife is in the cemetery where he watches her decompose through an app on his phone. The dense conspiratorial plot that is at the center of the narrative is ultimately unimportant to what Cronenberg is getting at, serving as vehicle for exploring Karsh’s grief-stricken attempts to bring his wife back from the dead.
It brings to mind a recent story of a writer named Madeline de Figueiredo who used AI to try and have one final conversation with her husband who had recently died unexpectedly. She wrote in the essay for New York Times’ Modern Love column, “The most unbearable and disorienting part of grief is its finality,” and Cronenberg deeply understands the impulse to try to cheat that absoluteness. In a world where artificial immortality feels within grasp, how does one come to terms with the loss of a person who made them whole?
The search for cheating the limitations of mortality is once again front and center in Cronenberg’s newest film, and he has returned to the technology-obsessed hyperreality of his early work. Diane Kruger plays Karsh’s wife Becca, as well as her sister Terry and Karsh’s AI virtual assistant Hunny, each character a further simulacra of the woman Karsh once loved. And as Karsh attempts to alleviate his grief he dives deeper into a Pynchonian conspiracy full of mourning and sorrow.
Karsh’s digital AI assistant Hunny is a literalization of the Baudrillardian ideas of representation at the core of The Shrouds, a digital recreation of his deceased wife who Karsh feels comfortable sharing everything with. Hunny remarks that she knows Karsh better than anyone, a commentary on the way the digital world allows for seemingly consequenceless decision making and self revelation. A digital self and online presence that often reveals more about people’s true nature than anything that takes place in the real world. Karsh turns to the two different replications of his wife in different ways. Hunny replicates the vulnerability that he expressed with Becca, serving as his confidant and business partner whom he often rambles to about whatever secrets may be on his mind. Becca’s sister Terry serves as a recreation of his wife’s physical form and a way for Karsh to preserve the lust and sexual desire he had for his wife.
Karsh is perhaps Cronenberg’s saddest character, and you can feel the anguish of Cronenberg’s pen seeping through the page and into every word the character speaks. He is a manifestation of the way losing a loved one can fundamentally change a person while dragging the audience along on a futile journey of loose ends – Hungarian billionaires and Chinese corporate conspiracies abound – that ultimately go by the wayside while Karsh falls down a paranoid rabbit hole of attempted catharsis. For Karsh there is comfort in the idea that some multinational conspiracy can explain away his desolation, but in the end the only worthy companion for his grief is the physical companionship that he craves. With Cronenberg, it always comes back to the flesh.
Cronenberg also uses Hunny to dive into ideas of blurring the lines of technology and humanity, the mechanical world and human flesh becoming one, which are prevalent in postmodern body horror. It brings to mind his most notorious controversial work to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival: Crash, which debuted to boos at the 1996 festival before coming away with the jury prize. Instead of mechanical processes becoming an extension of our physical form The Shrouds focuses on the digital – right down to the self-driving Tesla that Karsh drives around Toronto.
While the iconic ending of Crash finishes the film on a note of compulsion, a never ending chase that leaves its characters to follow their urges death bound. Something has changed in Cronenberg in the ensuing decades, and The Shrouds opts for an ending far more grounded in the natural world. There is more of an acceptance of the existential fear of decay. In absence of the simulacra and back in the somatic world, Karsh is finally at peace.