“How dark are you willing to go?” Vincent Cassel asks early in the trailer for The Shrouds, the upcoming film from David Cronenberg, master of the creepy and uncanny and bodily horrifying. The titular shrouds are, uh, well, I’m going to let the synopsis explain:
In an eerie, deceptively placid near-future, a techno-entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While Karsh is still reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger) from cancer—and falling into a peculiar sexual relationship with his wife’s sister (also Kruger)—a spate of vandalized graves utilizing his “shroud” technology begins to put his enterprise at risk, leading him to uncover a potentially vast conspiracy. Written following the death of the director’s wife, the new film from David Cronenberg is both a profoundly personal reckoning with grief and a descent into noir-tinged dystopia, set in an ominous world of self-driving cars, data theft, and A.I. personal assistants. Offering Cronenberg’s customary balance of malevolence and wit, The Shrouds is a sly and thought-provoking consideration of the corporeal and the digital, the mortal and the infinite.
Okay! Everything here is totally normal! Leah Schnelbach, who has seen The Shrouds, says, “It’s about DEATH and GRIEF and UNCOMFORTABLE CRONENBERGIAN SEX.”
This all tracks, as does the presence of Cassel, who has over the years played a whole range of creepy (Westworld, Black Swan, La Haine). Here, he seems the least creepy thing in the film, which is delightful casting. With Kruger playing the protagonist’s dead wife and her living sister, we are sure to get into some really weird spaces. The Shrouds also stars Sandrine Holt (Mr. Robot, The Expanse) and a nigh-unrecognizable Guy Pearce (The Brutalist, LA Confidential).
Cronenberg told Variety, “Conspiracies can be a grief strategy. If you’re an existentialist like me or an atheist like me and like Vincent’s character, you don’t have religion to fall back on. You can’t say, ‘I might get to see my dead wife again in heaven.’ You may come to the point where you think, there is no meaning to the death of this person. And that is really quite unbearable. The fact that it’s meaningless. And so, to find meaning, which we have evolved to seek, it is somehow comforting to think that there was a conspiracy, and that this person was part of a plan—that this person has been murdered or that it was all part of a medical experiment gone wrong.”
The Shrouds is in theaters in select cities on April 18th, and opens wide April 25th.
