David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds

Cronenberg will take part in a Q&A this evening at Film at Lincoln Center moderated by Amy Taubin, who in nearly all of her many interviews with the director—for Film Comment in 2007 and 2012, for example, or for Artforum in 2022—expertly coaxes Cronenberg into discussing connections between any given film at hand and the rest of his oeuvre. Taubin, by the way, includes Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005) on her list of the ten greatest films of all time in the most recent Sight and Sound poll, and as it happens, Scott Tobias has revisited that film on its twentieth anniversary this week at the Reveal.

Tomorrow evening, Cronenberg will be joined at FLC by Diane Kruger, who tackles three roles in The Shrouds: Rebecca, the late wife of Karsh, an entrepreneur (Vincent Cassel, unsubtly coifed and clothed to look like a Cronenberg avatar); Terry, Becca’s surviving twin sister; and Hunny, Karsh’s animated, cheery, but also manipulative AI assistant. A Saturday evening screening will be introduced by Violet Lucca, the author of David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials, a collection of essays and interviews illustrated by Little White Lies—whose editor, David Jenkins, calls The Shrouds one of Cronenberg’s “most nakedly moving and revelatory films.”

In a piece for the Nation on both Lucca’s book and the new film, John Semley writes that “Cronenberg’s career trajectory follows an arc of reverse radicalism, in which his early reactionary tendencies have been replaced by a more thoughtful consideration of his own anxieties and revulsions.” For Semley, The Shrouds is “an intensely, often uncomfortably personal film that challenges the perception of Cronenberg as a mere provocateur—while being every bit as provocative as any film he’s ever made.”

In his many conversations about The Shrouds—you can watch Cronenberg give an hourlong master class at the Cinémathèque française, listen to him talk with Film Comment’s Devika Girish and Clinton Krute, or read interviews conducted by Joshua Encinias at MovieMaker, Isaac Feldberg at RogerEbert.com, Nick Newman at the Film Stage, and Marshall Shaffer at Slant—Cronenberg has not been coy about what this film means to him personally.

He began writing The Shrouds while mourning his wife of nearly forty years, Carolyn Zeifman, who died in 2017. “It obviously had to be about my wife’s death, in its fictionalized form,” he tells Josh Rottenberg in the Los Angeles Times. “I started to go through in my mind things that I had felt. In the movie, Vincent Cassel’s character says, ‘I wanted to get into the box with her.’ That was a really visceral feeling. And it was true.”

Karsh has designed a means of getting into the box with Becca, at least virtually. Her decaying corpse has been wrapped in an enveloping cloak of tiny cameras beaming detailed images to an app—and to a monitor embedded in her gravestone. Cronenberg “handles this unabashedly morbid material with a disarming drollery,” writes Justin Chang in the New Yorker. “Much of the dialogue has an expository flatness, which only heightens the grim comedy of the whole conceit; Cronenberg’s cool, latex-sheathed touch keeps brushing up against your funny bone.”

Cronenberg “overshares strategically,” writes Mark Asch for InsideHook, “allowing his stand-in to be at times horny, at times angry and irrational; likewise the film is full of sly jokes and strange digressions and alienating yet beguilingly direct stylistic shortcuts. It’s wonderful to see this great artist operating entirely on his own terms.”

“On a production level,” writes David Jenkins, “this is just precision filmmaking of the highest stripe, and there’s a heartbeat-like rhythm to both the syntax and syncopations of the dialogue, and the beautifully-judged shot/reverse shot edits. Howard Shore delivers another one of his gorgeous synth scores, this one with an aptly funereal vibe, and longtime production designer Carol Spier threads the needle between a world of pristine modern innovation and Japanese minimalism (represented via Karsh’s man cave, replete with tatami mats and indoor Koi pond).”

Karsh has turned his invention, GraveTech, into a commercial venture, and it’s taken off. At one point, the cemetery he’s invested in—and where Becca is buried—is vandalized. Who would do such a thing? Icelandic environmental activists? Karsh’s brother-in-law, Maury (Guy Pearce)? The Russians? The Chinese? And why?

“Feel free to place bets on whichever MacGuffins and red herrings suit your fancy,” writes Rolling Stone’s David Fear. “Cronenberg is less interested in who done it and far more intrigued with the emotional contours of how one attempts to move on after a staggering loss—or, perhaps, why you’d want to when grief has become a key part of your identity, which is a far scarier thought he’d like you to muse on.”