‘The Shrouds’ Review: David Cronenberg’s Exploration of Loss Ends Up Digging Its Own Grave | Cannes

We love it when a prominent auteur uses cinema to take stock of time passed and the remaining time; to cherish the love he must have drawn inspiration from; and not least, to sublimate his fear of death. I’m using “he” pronouns here on purpose, as statistics show that male filmmakers have a tendency to reflect on those things as if they were one, like Abel Ferrara, Francis Ford Coppola, and Paul Schrader have done, explicitly or more covertly so. David Cronenberg is no exception to the rule as we see him swapping the futuristic nostalgia of his 2022 Palme d’Or feature Crimes of the Future for an indigestible past in his latest Cannes Competition entry, The Shrouds. 

Faithful to his long-term fascination with technology and alternative embodiments, here, Cronenberg proposes an invention that enables one to monitor the dead—to have a hi-res live stream of their body as it decomposes—wrapped in specially designed shrouds. The person who came up with GraveTech is Karsh (Vincent Cassel, resembling the director himself), a widower of four years, as a coping strategy to deal with the death of his beloved Becca (Diane Kruger). Of Becca, we know very little, and throughout the film, her presence is more symbolic than actually felt: she appears in Karsh’s dreams, beautiful, but weakened; seductive, but disabled. What we do know is that she died of cancer, a disease that makes one wane in pain, but that cannot by any means account for why Becca appears with an amputated arm and breast.

Kruger, who received the Best Actress award in Cannes 2017 for her lead performance in Fatih Akin’s In The Fade, is actually tasked with two (and a half) roles in The Shrouds, playing both the deceased Becca and her twin-sister Terry. Terry is a cynical dog groomer who, for some reason, finds conspiracy theories arousing; it is not clear what her real motivations are as a character, and in a way, she is libido personified. The same goes for Soo-min (Sandrine Holt), an elegant blind woman who catches Karsh’s eye. It is not long until he decides to rebound his grief with the help of those two libidinal figures, whenever the memory of his late wife allows him. All in all, however much they try, both actresses fall prey to the film’s lack of thematic and tonal consistency: they seem to be off the mark at all times.

It would have been great if the film was just another metaphor a’la Cronenberg, where bodies and technology equal Eros and Thanatos. But The Shrouds takes on way too much and spreads itself too thin with an investigative narrative thread—some of the monitored graves are desecrated out of the blue—that turns wildly conspiratorial (Russia? China?) in a way that unfortunately dilutes the central theme of loss. There is an emphasis on how idealistic the GraveTech set-up is, from the shrouds themselves, the monitoring app, and the interactive gravestones that go with them, and it’s only natural the film includes skepticism and ridicule from people who are not willing to buy in it. As always, in Cronenberg’s world there are those who embrace the newness and those who reject it, but the film does not dwell on the ethical conundrums a post-mortem surveillance can pose; instead, it all stops at how ‘freaky’ it is.

Even if one can look over the awkward and insultingly repetitive wordplay that couples ‘crypt’ and ‘encrypted,’ the film misses a major opportunity to reflect on the embalming qualities of cinema. Karsh’s invention is a literal (if macabre) representation of what French film theorist André Bazin wrote about the essence of cinema, comparing the moving image to the Turin shroud, yet this conceptual proximity is left unexplored. Cronenberg’s work is known for reimagining the human body beyond its (human) confines, whether it’s through technology (Videodrome, Scanners), metamorphosis (The Fly), or surgery (Crimes of the Future), and has used bodily surfaces to talk about deeply human issues such as fear, lust, and impending grief, but The Shrouds seems overwritten and underdeveloped at the same time. It’s hard to tell why exactly it misses all the marks.

In trying to pay tribute to Cronenberg’s late wife, the film reduces its women to smokescreen projections. Instead of exploring the idea of an eternal cinematic gaze six feet under, it quickly moves onto a game of deceit, cheating, and political conspiracies. Neither Cassel’s sleek silver hairdo nor Kruger’s thirsty gaze can redeem The Shrouds; we can only hope that in a few years, the Canadian director will decide to revisit the film and give it a second chance. It worked for Crimes of the Future, at least.

Grade: C-

This review is from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival where The Shrouds premiered in Competition. It has yet to secure U.S. distribution.