20/49
acceptable might be the right word?
Tale
Karsh, an innovative businessman and grieving widower, builds a device to connect with the dead inside a funeral shroud. Diane Kruger replaced Léa Seydoux in her role. Cited in Film Junk Podcast: Episode 961: In a Violent Nature + TIFF 2024 (2024). Compared to the mediocre "Crimes of the Future", Cronenberg’s previous effort and return to the body horror subgenre that made him famous, "The Shrouds" is a return to doing something… But as in that earlier film, in almost every scene of "The Shrouds" you’re likely to think of another similar Cronenberg film that, quite possibly, did it better.
But it’s still a chore to follow our rather bland protagonist through some sort of investigation that grows more tedious by the minute
You may, in particular, remember the fantastic “Crash,” which dealt with similar themes of macabre voyeurism and sexual fascination with death, physical corruption, and injury in a much more memorable way. It’s the curse of older, more established filmmakers that their latest offerings are incessantly compared to their previous masterpieces, but it’s also inevitable when said filmmakers are so clearly out of fresh ideas. That the story, which is much more elaborate than “Crimes of the Future,” literally goes nowhere is not a major issue: it’s just an epiphenomenon to toy with more fundamental themes. I defy you to actually care about any of the answers surrounding the many mysteries at the heart of “The Shrouds.” Not that you should expect any answers anyway. What matters is the psyche of our protagonist, which is made clear in the opening scene (and I imagine the last one, which made part of the packed auditorium laugh with its spectacular launch of the story in the middle of nowhere).
Even worse perhaps, his supposed fascination never feels real, authentic, exhausting
Those two scenes work in conveying the idea that the story is really about processing the grief of the loss of a loved one, which makes sense given that Cronenberg used his wife’s death as a starting point for the story. Yet, once again, it all feels like a late variation (if not an outright repetition) of things Cronenberg had already done and said, rather than a new, late take on these same issues. What bothers me most is the fact that the protagonist never feels truly disturbed at his psychic core by what is happening to him; Vincent Cassel, who is certainly on par with James Woods or James Spader, is quite good as the cold, cool tech entrepreneur who loves minimalism and crypto-necrophilia, but when it comes to expressing any kind of compulsion and fascination, there is simply too little to sustain the film. No descent into the dark side for our hero, no journey through the unexplored and disgusting swamps of his soul – or contemporary society. And this, for me, is the most disappointing thing about “The Shrouds”.
How the other pole of the director’s work, technology, is never really addressed
His best horror films explore the collective unconscious and how we humans relate to technology. How there is no real opposition between the organic and the machinic but a real symbiosis coming. How our unconscious instincts and desires compel us to reclaim, merge, and do unspeakable things with our gadgets. Nothing like that here, with an interesting premise that never really gets explored. With cell phones, self-driving Teslas, and a personal AI it just feels like ticking uninspired boxes.
Too bad “The Shrouds” decides to stay on the surface rather than dig up the corpses that haunt our fantasies
The AI assistant part of the plot, like so much else, should have been elaborated upon, though I get the idea: behind our machinery and supposedly autonomous technology, there are us and our unconfessed and shameful desires.
