In The shrouds, Vincent Cassel plays a widower that uses technology to monitor the remains of his deceased wife.
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When The shrouds Firied in film festivals last year, David Cronenberg described it as his most personal work – a deeply felt response to the death of his longtime wife, cancer in 2017. The film talks about a man named Karsh, who lost his wife, Rebecca, against cancer four years earlier.
It is not the only similarity. If you know what Cronenberg looks like, you will see that Karsh, played by Vincent Cassel with a silver shock of hair, looks like the director – maybe not a dead ringtone, but close enough to give you a cold – and a little little laughter.
That’s the thing The shrouds; It is deeply morbid and sad, but it is also disarming. Karsh is the brain behind a company called Gravetech, which allows people to monitor the remains of their loved ones.
Before the body is buried, it is wrapped in a high -tech metal shroud, equipped with an MRI style scanner. And so, at any time, with a blow on your phone, you can watch a flow, the grave, the decaying body. It’s not just on your phone either; The flow also goes to a screen integrated into the tombstone of the person.
Karsh himself uses the severity of gravity in a obsessive way, keeping an eye on his woman’s body at any time. It naturally made him difficult for him to move on. A first funny scene finds Karsh at a blind meeting with a woman who goes towards the exit as soon as she discovers what he does in life. The next day, Karsh set out the appointment with the sister of Becca, Terry, played by Diane Kruger.
Cronenberg is often described as a master of body horror, a sub-genre that he helped to pioneer with the first efforts like The brood And Scanning and recently pushed to new bold extremes with the wonderfully Icky Crimes of the future.
The label can however be misleading. Cronenberg films are even more cerebral than they are visceral, and he has never been purely interested in the grotesque for the good of the grotesque. The shrouds is certainly a body of body horror in the most relatable sense: it is the physical ravages of illness and death. At various times, Karsh sees Becca – also played by Kruger – in dreamlike flashbacks which reveal exactly what cancer has done to his body. I cannot think of a filmmaker in addition to Cronenberg who could present the body in this way: with a clinical franchise, an unpublished desire and a real tenderness.
At the beginning of the film, someone vandalizes the grave cemetery, tearing the tombstones of its foundations and hacking video flows, for unknown reasons. The shrouds It is not only a horror film on bodily decomposition; It is a thriller imbued with techno-paranoia.
To go to the bottom of vandalism, Karsh enrôt the help of the ex-husband of Terry, a Whiz IT played by an enthusiastic guy Pearce. Karsh also relies on an AI personal assistant – expressed by, you guessed it, Kruger again – who does not seem entirely worthy of confidence. There are whispers that vandals are aligned with dark Russian and / or Chinese forces, referring to a mass data conspiracy which may or may not exist.
The shrouds Never completely coherent as a mystery; at the end, It is an intriguing but not particularly satisfactory puzzle. I didn’t mind that; Cronenberg is not there to provide easy answers. He says that we live in such a fog on the Internet 24/7 now, who knows what could be there, exploiting the most human and vulnerable parts of ourselves: our habits, our aspirations, our relationships. This is not a new theme for Cronenberg; It has always been fascinated by the way technology changes our mind and even our body.
In his 1983 classic VideodromeThe director inserted a betamax cassette into the chest of his protagonist, literalizing the idea of what television makes us. The shrouds is not as graphic, but it is not necessary to be; It takes place in a world where most of us have already merged with our phones. All this to say that this film apparently obsessed with death – on sorrow and desire, and the disturbing power of technology to appease them – is also a film on life and the good that some of us live now.
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