A man mourns his dead wife by watching her corpse slowly decay in David Cronenberg's 2025 film, The Shrouds. A haunting movie for atheists, it gives you the ghosts of compulsive thoughts and psychological phantom limbs. It's fascinating and I'm so happy David Cronenberg's still translating his unique vision to film.
A lot of movies have been made about men obsessing with dead women; Laura, Vertigo, Twin Peaks. Vertigo's my favourite movie and I tend to see it everywhere but halfway through The Shrouds one character actually says that heights give her vertigo so I think I can say with some confidence Vertigo really was an influence here. It's certainly Cronenberg's most Hitchcockian film with its plot involving international intrigue, though there was plenty here to remind me of Cronenberg's Scanners and Videodrome as well.
Cronenberg has said he doesn't believe in the soul or any separate spiritual entity beyond the flesh. He doesn't believe in reincarnation or an afterlife. For him, the dead body is the continued existence of a person. It makes sense he would make a movie like this after the real life death of his wife--he has called it a personal, even autobiographical film. The main character, Karsh (Vincent Cassel), has dreams of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), visiting him in bed at night, naked, slowly losing one body part after another to her cancer treatment. One has the sense of memories regurgitated by the dream being modified to reflect his obsessions.
In Karsh's waking life, there are two duplicates of Becca; there's Terry, Becca's twin sister (also Diane Kruger), and Karsh's AI personal assistant, Honey (a cgi character voiced by Kruger). Honey was created by Maury (Guy Pearce), Terry's ex-husband. As in Vertigo and Videodrome, a lot of the anxiety experienced by Karsh revolves around other men taking control of the woman he loves. Becca's doctor, who goes unseen throughout the film, is also her former, and perhaps continued, lover named Jerry Eckler, a name I thought similar to Gavin Elster, the man who controlled the woman the protagonist of Vertigo is obsessed with.
Karsh runs GraveTech, a company that provides people with live feeds of the decaying corpses of loved ones in their coffins. As with Cronenberg's 1996 film Crash, it feels like the director has invented a human compulsion that does not exist in reality; it's hard to believe anyone could turn such a thing into a viable business. It does certainly convey a sense of Karsh's/Cronenberg's compulsion. Karsh is startled to notice his wife's body slowly accruing strange, tiny, apparently artificial objects adhering to her skull and ribcage. Iceland, Russia, and China start coming up in conversations and Maury warns Karsh that all the software in his home and personal devices has been infiltrated, that everything he says and does is being monitored. Maury's own trustworthiness is called into question. Karsh's new girlfriend, Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), warns him that Honey can't be trusted. Karsh is introduced as a powerful man who made a fortune producing "industrial videos" before launching his more eccentric business ventures but the film's fundamental horror is of a man feeling he has complete control discovering that he has almost none, that even his most private thoughts and compulsions are mere tools of entities he can't even positively identify. The most horrible manifestation of a loss of control is the loss of the most important person in his life but this great blow seems to be the root of a spreading disease of helplessness.
Douglas Koch's cinematography is elegant and dark and Howard Shore's score is appropriately anxious and mournful. The Shrouds had its exclusive streaming premiere on The Criterion Channel yesterday.
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