When his wife died, Karsh tells the blind date he asked for lunch, he had an overwhelming urge to jump into the coffin with her rather than see her sent away alone. Instead, he came up with a way to separate the worlds of the living and the dead, setting up a luxurious cemetery where the dead are wrapped in metal shrouds that resemble camera blankets. Above the ground there are screens above each grave where you can watch your loved one disintegrate.
Welcome to Gravetech, the latest of Canadian director David Cronenberg’s sinister institutions, and welcome to The shroudsCronenberg’s latest feature debuting in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
In the four years since her death, the painfully grieving Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has logged on to watch his wife Becca’s body – which was already crumbling from cancer before she died – rot to the bone. The grave next to hers is reserved for him. Karsh also owns the chic restaurant that overlooks the immaculate cemetery. Would this nice lady in the navy blazer want to join him in looking at the rotting skeleton of his Becca? Could this possibly be the worst date ever?
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Cronenberg is known as the doyen of body horror, but even the most gruesome of his films fit poorly with the conventions and expectations of the horror genre. Rather, his films are rooted in his fascination with the body: with our pink inner flesh, with the way the body pulsates in life and deteriorates in death, with its disorders, addictions, perversions and potential transformations.
That does not mean that he is not also intrigued by the outside world: how institutions interact with people and how people interact with each other. Now 81, he has forged his own genre from this mix of the visceral and cerebral, sticking to a simple shooting style and encouraging a lack of affect in his actors, leaving no doubt that these are think pieces first and foremost are. Personally, Cronenberg is a municipal professor. You expect him to give you a reading list.
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Fortunately, his usual flat style is boosted here by the performances of actors new to his pulpy universe. Cassel, who embodies the grieving Karsh, seems to tremble with emotions that are barely kept under control. Diane Kruger plays both his dead wife – always naked and sometimes partially dismembered in his tortured black-and-white dreams – and her sister Terry, a crazy dog ​​walker who drives him to have an affair with her.
Guy Pearce gives a fabulously excited, mouth-foaming performance as Maury, a computer expert whose divorce from Terry six years earlier has left him in despair. Maury installed Karsh’s computer. He now claims to live in it, together with the blonde Hunny the AI ​​bot – also Maury’s creation – who does Karsh’s administration. She also tries to cheer him up by appearing on his screen as a koala, which is the kind of misinterpretation of a room you’d expect from an AI bot. Or, indeed, Maury’s.
We are introduced to Gravetech’s activities at a moment of crisis, when nine of the graves – including Becca’s – have been smashed to pieces. It is clear that the vandals selected certain graves; Further research shows that the skeletons in these graves are covered with small protuberances that resemble polyps, but are subsequently identified as transmitters. What are they for? Who destroyed these graves and why? All wires have been cut and access to the bodies denied, but to what end? No one demands ransom.
On this point, The shrouds presents as a fairly simple mystery, albeit with added tidbits of the macabre. There are twists and turns; there are turns. Was Becca’s oncologist, a guy named Ekler and her boyfriend before she met Karsh, using her body like a lab rat for experimental treatments? Did she know this and surrender anyway? The shrouds themselves were manufactured in China; Are they the vanguard of a surveillance network that will soon spread across the Western Hemisphere, and not just the graves? Were the doctors in cahoots with Chinese agents, as Maury believes? Or Russians, given Maury’s entanglements with Russian hackers?
In the last half hour of The shrouds, these various plot threads (and many others, too numerous to mention) whip around dangerously like loose electrical cables in a storm. Terry tells Karsh that she is sexually aroused by conspiracy theories, which seems to work for him too. By the time the final titles roll, and the question of who hit those tombstones with a hammer is still unanswered, they must surely be burning like that proverbial ring of fire. Whatever else you might expect from Cronenberg as a distinctive author – wry humor, a measured pace, delighted wallowing in filthy sludge – you don’t expect the story to shatter into pieces. That’s a really new kind of ick.
Title: The shrouds
Festival: Cannes (competition)
Director-screenwriter: David Cronenberg
Form: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt
Sales agent: SBS International
Duration: 1 hour 56 minutes
