‘The Shrouds’: On Grief
A review of ‘The Shrouds’, by David Cronenberg, 2024.
When they lowered the body of his wife into the coffin, Karsh had an overwhelming urge to get into the box with her. So he tells his date over dinner in a restaurant next to a graveyard. And he does not mean he wished to metaphorically: he really did want to climb into that coffin. Unable to do so, he set up a company that lets the grieving watch their loved ones rot beneath the ground. When he takes his date to see his wife’s decaying corpse, she is, quite understandably, taken aback. She goes off for a cigarette. We can assume a second date is unlikely.
The Shrouds is David Cronenberg’s latest, perhaps most personal, film. The title character, played by Vincent Cassel, has the filmmaker’s build and shock of white hair; like Cronenberg, he has lost his wife (Diane Kruger) and is struggling to come to terms with it. When several graves including his wife’s are desecrated, Karsh sets off to find out why. What follows is a kind of detective story (Karsh even says this explicitly) but there are porridge of subplots involving shape-shifting AI helpers, schizophrenic geeks, foreign state interference, grisly dream sequences, and a sister-in-law who grooms dogs.
The Shrouds is David Cronenberg’s latest and perhaps most personal film. The title character, played by Vincent Cassel, has the filmmaker’s build and shock of white hair.
All of this unfolds in a resolutely one-note fashion. After the inciting incident, tension is meant to rise, events to arrange themselves, and the thing to move towards climax and dénouement. Convention isn’t everything, of course, but its absence is usually made up for by something else. Here, it is not. From beginning to end, save for the occasional intrusion of body horror, the film manages to provoke remarkably little feeling. It advances. Things occur. One is aware of progress. Yet the cumulative effect is curiously deadening, as though motion itself had been mistaken for drama.
And one suspects this is deliberate. The film concerns itself with grief, and grief governs everything. It announces itself not as anguish but as numbness and mild bewilderment: pleasures flatten, former excitements lose their charge, and the mind busies itself inventing reasons for what it cannot yet accept. The subplots function accordingly. They resemble the small, intricate conspiracies the bereaved construct while reality is still being denied or negotiated with — busy, faintly implausible stories whose real purpose is not truth, but delay.
Unlike his dead wife, Becca, Karsh is an atheist, as well as a technologist. His world is one of certainty and control. The believer may not have made his peace with death; but his faith gives him a way in which to think about it. He is of necessity open to mystery, at ease to some extent with ambiguity. Karsh is not like this. Indeed, he admits he could not bear the thought of his wife rotting alone in her coffin. He invented GraveTech so he could watch her. This, admittedly, is an unusual solution; but the picture painted is one of a man who simply must know what is happening.
Grief makes itself known to us in a kind of numbness and confusion. We no longer take joy in the things that once thrilled us.
Personal it may be, but the film nonetheless asks trenchant questions about how one should think about death in an age in love with control. We can manipulate the world in countless ways; we have been taught we can even choose who and what we are. Yet, as Horace dryly tells us, ‘You may drive Nature out with a pitchfork, and she keeps on coming back.’ Reality, tiresome as ever, prevails. As it is, we are not all-powerful, and we have not defeated death. Chaucer, in The Pardoner’s Tale, tries to shows us what happens when we try. But life extension and transhumanism are large if not respectable industries. Through drugs and technology, runs the thinking, we can already make life longer. So why not longer still? One must concede it is not the most worst argument in the world.
The question soon slips from the practical to the philosophical. It is dearness only that gives everything its value, as Tom Paine writes in ‘The Crisis’; and death is a fairly dear price to pay. Put more bluntly, it is the fact that life ends that makes it worth living. How would one live if one could live forever, or even for a little longer? Not that reconciling oneself to one’s death is easy. As for grief, perhaps having half-persuaded ourselves that modern science might spare us such experiences, the death of those we love risks not merely wounding us, but undoing us altogether.
That life ends is what makes it worth living. How would we live if we could live forever, or even for a little longer?
The Shrouds is shot beautifully. The colour palette is monochrome, as if the film itself were in mourning; but it is still undeniably handsome, and its cool aesthetic restraint cuts a rather stark contrast with the decaying corpses and dismembered bodies to which we are treated from time to time. The cast—Cassel, Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Hold—do what is asked of them well. But Cassel, who may possess the world’s most interesting face, is perhaps better-suited to roles in which he can express himself more forcefully (I am thinking of La Haine, Eastern Promises, and Irréversible). Here he plays a sedate and rational technology entrepreneur. But then you see his resemblance to Cronenberg and it all makes more sense.
People say that the length of The Wolf of Wall Street is part of the point. The film is about excess, so the length is excessive. Thus runs the argument. That is all very well and good; but in the end what matters is that the film works, not whether the form of the film is perfectly true to the content. When style gets in the way of story, something has surely misfired. And this is the trouble with The Shrouds: it has the numbing, never-ending, unfeeling character of grief, but—well, regrettably, that does not make for a deeply satisfying film.
