The Shrouds: a grimly necrophiliac fantasy from David Cronenberg
In the pantheon of ideas only David Cronenberg might have conceived, try this for size: a high-tech cemetery operation with cameras inside the coffins, rigged up to provide 360o, 24/7 footage of your dead loved ones as they rot away. Moreover, only Cronenberg – whose wife Carolyn died seven years ago – might have mined this premise for icky eroticism: the film is especially personal, not to mention a necrophile’s wet dream.
It’s clear right away that the CEO of “GraveTech”, Karsh (Vincent Cassel), is a surrogate for the Canadian director, with his dramatic sweep of silver hair, and a wife called Becca (Diane Kruger), after whom he mournfully lusts.
True, Becca is unignorably showing her age as a withering corpse. Her skeleton in repose is also missing half its left arm, which was amputated in a lost battle against some fast-acting bone disease. The more she decays in her grave – that “fine and private place”, as Andrew Marvell put it – the more Karsh actively yearns for her embrace.
The Shrouds has potential to be morbidly hilarious, deeply twisted and strange, or rather moving: the fact that it only feints in those directions, while prioritising several less fruitful ones, makes it the steepest disappointment of Cronenberg’s late career.
The first scene ends with jet-black comedy. Karsh is entertaining a woman named Myrna (Jennifer Dale) at the swish restaurant he owns within the funeral complex. It ends as every first date should – with boy escorting girl to his wife’s grave and bringing up a livestream of her crumbling remains. Myrna previously seems up for anything, but this is possibly a bridge too far, and we never see her again.
Instead, we become embroiled in a pointlessly elaborate plot about sabotage, when unknown enemies break in and desecrate the graves. Karsh hires Becca’s brother-in-law Maury (Guy Pearce as a twitchy nerd) to get to the bottom of this security breach, while her living sister Terry (also Kruger, who’s better as Becca) makes herself available for an act of infidelity he promised he’d never commit.
Those two have a vigorous sex scene, but there’s a more provocative one in flashback with the mutilated Becca, which gets dismayingly aborted when Karsh crushes one of her ribs by mistake.
Cassel is a major sticking point throughout. His diction makes the script sound more wooden than it is; he never takes command of the film or feels like he runs a company. The right Cronenberg star to play Karsh was surely Jeff Goldblum, who could have landed the reams of dialogue with macabre relish, and perhaps sold the role as part undertaker, part grieving mafioso.
Watching The Shrouds dribble its way through a third act that’s as anticlimactic as it is knotty, we can only lament all the weird, intrepid endings Cronenberg might have found for a story about the destiny of flesh – none of which, alas, he actually chose.
Screening at the Cannes Film Festival; 116 min, cert TBC, UK release TBC
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