The critical response to David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds
was heavily informed by the styling of star Vincent Cassel to evoke Cronenberg
himself, and by the knowledge of Cronenberg having been widowed after a long
marriage; although those data points aren’t irrelevant, they may lead one to
expect a more morosely introspective film than the director actually delivers here. On
the contrary, it’s in some respects among his most playful works (even as the
customarily frosty tone discourages such a reading), a construct in which
almost nothing can be taken at face value, even (or perhaps especially) the facts
attaching to the dead. The shrouds of the title are designed by Cassel’s Karsh to
be wrapped around bodies (including that of his own wife, dead from cancer) before
burial, allowing the family to view their decomposition, or whatever else may
transpire underground; the technology is hacked and the graves vandalized, kicking
off a chain of events including both Chinese and Russian interests, and transgressions
including suggestions of extreme medical malpractice. But it’s all mostly
talked about rather than dramatized, and further, talked about in terms that
are either speculative or unreliable; for example, the narrative culminates in an
unexplained burial, for which it offers at least four different explanations, with
Karsh declining to take the obvious action that would narrow those down. The overall
effect is certainly somewhat rarified and cerebral, but also uncommonly
destabilizing and invasive, its ending providing only the most superficial
closure (at best). Cronenberg allows his protagonist two sexual partners in the
course of the narrative, one his wife’s twin sister, and the other the blind
wife of an important prospective client, providing even ecstatic release an
enmeshed and over-loaded quality (although again not without a streak of wry
amusement – the sister, for example, gets turned on by conspiracy theories,
seemingly the more outlandish the better…)
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