THE SHROUDS. It’s a fascinating thing, having spent the better part of a lifetime with the work of revered artists, to watch them age in the weird, liminal space of their output. In the past, they would often end up back at the bottom tier of an industry that no longer had a use for them (see Howard Hawks and Quentin Tarantino’s worst professional fear), becoming ever more distant from the culture they once influenced so greatly and churning out paycheck work that paled in comparison to their greater achievements.
Now, though, as age becomes a less-restrictive delineation, a number of godheads of contemporary cinema continue to work with materials and methods that challenge and excite them. In some cases, they even confront their own autobiographies, albeit in veiled and refracted ways. Even the professionally chameleonic Steven Spielberg, one of the few who managed to hold on to the old-school Hollywood journeyman identity while also reinventing American cinema, finally came around to The Fabelmans (2022) — only five decades in — and made a Spielberg movie about Spielberg(s). And now, with The Shrouds, David Cronenberg has made a movie only he could make, not just because it’s about the very intentionally staged intersection of sex, death, technology and greed, but because it would appear to be about the man himself. (He lost his wife of almost 40 years in 2017).
One of the first tenets of New Criticism (not so new anymore) is, of course, to separate art and artist in any conversation about the former. We were taught, all those decades ago, not to let the identity of the creator color our perception of the work and, most especially, not to conflate the artist’s personal history with the output. Time has obviously eroded the ironclad truth of the dictum, but these works of quasi-autobiography can still confound, which is likely why my first thoughts upon finishing The Shrouds were of The Fabelmans.
Although Cronenberg is older than Spielberg, they are, from the audience perspective, essentially peers. They both broke into the popular consciousness at the dawn of the 1970s and, while traveling wildly different professional paths, have worked nearly ceaselessly for the intervening decades. Both established working styles and aesthetic methods early on and have made movies unlike anyone else’s. Granted, one works almost exclusively in the realms of vivisection, gynecology and decay, while the other adapts Hergé and Roald Dahl.
Both directors have spent storied careers exploring their interests as only they can, but neither created a work of focused self-examination until a very late stage. While the movies in question couldn’t be more different — in some camps, polarizing — each is among the most accomplished and daring of their work.
I was maybe unfairly lukewarm on Crimes of the Future (2022), Cronenberg’s previous feature. Coming out of a period of introspection and earnestness brought on by political and epidemiological plagues, I think I wasn’t ready for the weird humor and artifice of that movie’s exploration of organ mutation as performance art. Looking back, I realize it merits a revisit, partly because the treatment of grief and sorrow at the core of The Shrouds is couched in the same sort of button-pushing, side-eyed satire.
Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel), looking more like Cronenberg than any character ever committed to film, is something of a renegade entrepreneur who, in an attempt to process the death of his wife, has invented a burial technology that allows the bereaved to observe the decomposition of their loved ones in real time. His burial shrouds, embedded with hundreds of ultra high-resolution cameras, transmit images to handheld devices and screens built into headstones so that, as Karsh might put it, the living may always possess the bodies of the dead. This being Cronenberg, there are also twins at play, international intrigue, spurned ex-husbands and digital nodes growing on the bones of the dead. The usual.
At bottom, though, this is the artist working very much within his preferred palette but with the more direct imperative of examining his avatar’s unravelling in the absence of relief. It is as heady as one might expect, but with its embrace of technology as a narrative device and its constant, biting sense of humor, it is a weirder and perhaps more cohesive work than Cronenberg has delivered in the last decade and a half.
Some might complain that The Shrouds is amorphous or that it doesn’t commit thoroughly enough to any of its many themes and threads, but I disagree. Exquisitely, beautifully executed as it is, I find its embrace of ambiguity and uncertainty an inextricable part of its greater appeal. R. 120M. PRIME.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.
This article appears in The Conductor.