‘The Shrouds’ Review
Stars: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders, Jennifer Dale, Eric Weinthal | Written and Directed by David Cronenberg
The Shrouds, the latest film from director David Cronenberg (he’s 81, you know) is a poorly conceived hodge-podge of ideas about sex, death and technology, with a dash of bog-standard body horror thrown in. Tonally, it’s all over the place, which means it fails to satisfy on a number of different levels.
As the film begins, it feels like jet jet-black comedy, except you’re not sure just how much you’re actually meant to be laughing. It opens in a restaurant, where tech genius Karsh (Vincent Cassel) – who also owns the restaurant – is entertaining a beautiful young woman (Elizabeth Saunders as Gray Foner) on a first date. Abruptly, he insists she accompanies him outside to the adjoining cemetery – which he also owns – so that he can show her not just the grave of his dead wife Becca (Diane Kruger), but also her three-month-old corpse decomposing in real-time, thanks to a digital camera-equipped shroud that projects 3D images to an app on his phone.
Sadly, Gray Foner’s purpose in the plot is entirely to provide a means for exposition, as she disappears immediately afterwards, although frankly, who can blame her? It’s only a shame that Cronenberg doesn’t cut to her returning home and her flatmate asking, “So…how did the date go?”
Instead, the underwhelming plot wanders off in another direction. When the grave sites are vandalised, Karsh brings in his former brother-in-law, tech genius Maury (Guy Pearce) to help him investigate, along with a digitally animated AI assistant called Hunny, who looks just like Becca. Was it an environmental protest group? Or are the Chinese somehow responsible, given that they appear to have hacked the shrouds?
To complicate things still further, Karsh starts sleeping with Maury’s ex-wife Terry (Diane Kruger again), who just so happens to be Becca’s twin sister. And as if that wasn’t enough, he also sleeps with Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), a somewhat high-risk strategy, given that she is married to a would-be investor.
Unfortunately, the plot never goes anywhere interesting, and if it feels like a lot of set-ups without much in the way of resolution, that might be because it was originally conceived as a TV series, for which Cronenberg wrote two full episodes before it was cancelled. Exactly how much tweaking Cronenberg did to those two episode scripts for the movie screenplay is open to debate, but The Shrouds certainly feels underdeveloped in execution.
What does come through is the meditation – in the director’s own Cronenbergian way – on grief and loss. Cronenberg has spoken openly about how the film was partly inspired by the recent loss of his wife, and that depth of feeling is strongly present throughout. Although giving Cassel a reasonable facsimile of Cronenberg’s actual hairdo was perhaps a step too far.
In short, The Shrouds is a disappointing miss from Cronenberg, feinting towards his perennial themes but ultimately failing to put them to any significant use.
