Culture
Now Playing – Dreams of the dead: Cronenberg returns to film with ‘The Shrouds,’ a story shrouded in grief and mystery
By: Gordon Briggs
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Over the years director David Cronenberg has crafted quite an unusual filmography. Spanning nearly 60 years, the filmmaker has brought us everything from the body horror romance of The Fly (1986), to biopics about Sigmund Freud with A Dangerous Method (2011), to films like Crash (1997), a kinky look at a secret community of people aroused by car crashes. True to form, his latest is the beguiling film The Shrouds, which continues the director’s exploration of the unholy melding of flesh, metal, trauma, and technology.
At first, I was slightly disappointed. I wanted Cronenberg to give me the skin-crawling body horror films like he used to. However, upon reflection, I appreciate The Shrouds not as body horror but as techno-Gothic body drama.
The film uses a decaying corpse to tell a strange story about the intersection of grief and technology. Here, we meet Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a widow/entrepreneur who, after losing his spouse, develops a machine designed to communicate with the dead via camera. Of course, it isn’t long before someone wants his death tech for their own sinister purposes.
The film works best when it articulates grief through the images of decaying bodies. For example, I enjoyed the dream sequences when Karsh’s dead lover appears to him at night, sometimes missing a limb or two. Plus, it’s intriguing to see Cassel try to unravel the mystery of who may be sabotaging his coffin cameras.
What left me scratching my head was the movie’s abrupt ending. An ending that didn’t seem to resolve its subplots and left me a little confused and having to look up “Shrouds ending explained” when I got back home.
It’s a good movie, but one I think I will have to revisit later to fully digest.
Rating: ★★★
Now Playing is a column by film scholar Dr. Gordon Briggs published each Tuesday and Thursday. Tuesday’s column focuses on recently released film, followed by a Thursday piece that offers historical context or explores a related film.