Cronenberg’s necrophilic meditation on grief
The Shrouds Cannes film festival ★★★☆☆
David Cronenberg’s new film is a contorted sphinx without a secret, an eroticised, necrophilic meditation on grief, longing and loss that returns this director to his familiar Ballardian fetishes. It’s a quasi-murder mystery and doppelganger sex drama combined with a sci-fi conspiracy thriller that comes close to participating in the xenophobia it purports to satirise.
Among its exasperating plot convolutions, there is a centrally important oncologist who was having a possible affair with the hero’s dead wife and who had also been her first sexual partner as a teenager – but who never appears on camera.
Yet for all this, the film has its own creepy atmosphere of disquiet, helped by the jarring electronic score by Howard Shore. We are in Toronto of the present or near future in which a wealthy and stylish widower and entrepreneur called Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has founded a restaurant with a cemetery attached: a state-of-theart burial place where people can inter their loved ones in a “shroud” with thousands of tiny cameras that transmit real time pictures of the body’s decay, which you can watch on your smartphone.
Needless to say, Karsh is getting pictures of his late wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), who had died after an impossibly painful struggle with metastatic breast cancer.
Where is it all leading? Well, maybe nowhere – and if that is the point, where does that point take us? Perhaps that we will never be free from grief, never be free from love, never be free from desire, never be free from the fragile body itself – and never be free from hoping for resolution, for meaning.