The Shrouds review - he wouldn't let it lie

“Dying is an act of eroticism,” suggested one of the many disposable characters in David Cronenberg’s first full-length feature, Shivers (1975), and that slippery adage could sum up more than a few of the Canadian sensationalist’s movies in the past 50 years – not least his latest, The Shrouds, which was in competition at Cannes last year.

As far back as the cheap and nasty Shivers, Cronenberg molested the line between the quick and the dead, pioneering horror motifs like inflamed-penis parasites bursting out of stomachs and plugholes and into people’s orifices. His films became famous for putting organs on the outside and then – as the pictures became more reflective – combing through the entrails like the seers of Ancient Greece.

The movies occupy an awkward zone between fetish exploration and condemnation, albeit involving fetishes that are beyond the ken of most. Thinking back through films like The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988) and Crash (1996), I can’t recall if Cronenberg literally used anyone’s guts for garters, though he might have come close.

After the past two decades shooting mostly other people’s scripts and turning away from human vivisection, he was back at it in his self-penned Crimes of the Future (2022), where the metastasising viscera of the still-living were exposed as works of art for the delectation of downtown trendies. “Surgery is the new sex,” claimed a character, though the tag-line didn’t quite made it onto the poster.

Set in a non-specific North America (though with Ontario number plates), The Shrouds traces the travails of a cemetery owner called Karsh (Vincent Cassel). He sells you grave plots with CCTV inside your loved one’s winding sheet, so you can watch the dear departed rot away at your leisure on your phone. It’s a way for Karsh to work through his own crippling grief: his late wife was one of the earliest into these video vaults, and by now she’s in a fairly raw state. Karsh admits to an “intense visceral urge” to climb into the tomb-with-a-view himself.

Diane Kruger plays the late wife’s sister Terry, a homey dog-groomer, as well as the late wife herself, who appears in various states of dismemberment in Karsh’s wet dreams. The versatile Kruger also voices a perky female chatbot who helps Karsh organise his life. The tech side of it is run by Terry’s ex-husband, a nebbishy scruff played against type by Guy Pearce.

This incestuous quartet, plus the blind wife of a magnate with whom Karsh has business dealings (Sandrine Holt), send him into a maze of rabbit holes when someone smashes up the cemetery and blocks the video feeds. What follows is more of a journalistic mystery than a thriller, as the film focuses on nameless menaces rather than physical threats. As played by Cassel, Karsh is like several of Cronenberg’s male leads – closed-off and punctilious but with a closet full of rods for his own back. And even as a buttoned-up type, the coiled-spring French actor gives a performance that threatens to punch through the frame as paranoia envelops him.

The movie is over-stuffed, hard to follow and rather watchable. It can be seen as the third in a Cronenberg “philosophical body-horror” triptych passing through Crimes of the Future to eXistenZ (1999). More than ever, the writer-director creates space for flowing dialogue in longish scenes, with the grunge-and-latex visual effects dialled back. But as usual there’s loads-a-sex, which only seems to be on the rise in the 82-year-old’s 21st feature. And he serves up a Cobb salad of genres and reference points. These range from the Turin Shroud, Stalinism and Viking runic symbols to Jewish eschatology, Icelandic eco-warriors, Russian and Chinese hackers, plus – naturally – AI.

A dark web of techno-corporate-medical malarkey has always obsessed Cronenberg, here supercharged by global surveillance fears. The dangerous turn-ons of science and the operating room are now joined by everyone’s love of conspiracies: even Kruger’s down-to-earth Terry gets a mad rush of lust as she twirls them around in her head. The director is well-served in The Shrouds by his cast, who keep things as deadpan and convincing as they can, by his cinematographer Douglas Koch and by his long-time composer Howard Shore, whose enveloping electronic and orchestral score mirrors the mix of artificiality and emotion on the screen.

Like other of Cronenberg’s whacked ideas, the central grave-peeking conceit has elements of the “Funny Old World” column in Private Eye, and Cronenberg insists on a comic aspect to his films amid their fetid moods of doom. Audience laughter, such as it is, comes less from the relief from tension of a regular horror movie, more from outright ludicrousness (just as there might be in, say, an over-the-top Peter Greenaway film). It’s the ludicrousness of the modern world, of voyeurism, of sex and death, and of Cronenberg’s own love-hate relationship with them all.

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