TIFF 2024 – David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds” Strikes a Unhurried, Talkative, and Strangely Haunting Chord

By: Myles Herod –
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Beginning with low-rent horror films in the 1970s, auteur David Cronenberg has moved film-by-film to the top of the ranks making him Canada’s elder statesman of cinema.

Unhurried, talkative, and strangely haunting, “The Shrouds” is not a return to the body-horror of his earlier works like “Rabid,” “Videodrome,” or “The Fly”. Instead its vision, which never compromises, is in a constant sense of loss.

Set in Toronto during the present or near future, French actor Vincent Cassell plays a wealthy man named Karsh, an entrepreneur who reacts to the death of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) five years earlier by spearheading technology that entombs corpses in a shroud, projecting their 3D images as they decompose. To say he’s tormented is underplaying things.

Alluring and exhausting, Cronenberg’s semi-murder mystery sex thriller doesn’t stop there. When a targeted attack on Karsh’s hi-tech graveyard by vandals spurs a number of maddening conspiracy theories, including one from his doppelgänger sister-in-law Terry (Diane Kruger, again), he seeks assistance from his tech-savant friend Maury (Guy Pearce) and animated AI helper “Hunny” (Diane Kruger, yet again) to diminishing, paranoid results.

Even for a minor Cronenberg film (like this is), there’s something to savour by the hands of an artist who’s been doing it for so long. Sure, there are jolts here too – the snap of a hip bone during sex made me jump – as well as its overall pervasive eerie mood that lays about every frame. For such an astonishing filmography, “The Shrouds” might be Cronenberg’s saddest picture, especially upon learning he lost his own wife, Carolyn, in 2017.