Writer-director David Cronenberg, the veteran specialist in “body horror” tales, sicker-than-thou science fiction and disturbing investigations into the latest trends in psychological torment, has recently spent his cinematic capital on things like Crimes of the Future or Maps to the Stars. That is, big-picture scenarios about modern people entangled in science-based predicaments. Cronenberg’s characters are always in some sort of jeopardy. They have good reason to feel apprehensive.
With that in mind, The Shrouds takes us into the life and times of a wealthy, renowned technocrat named Karsh (played by French actor Vincent Cassel), whose latest venture sounds like some type of techie joke.
In addition to his career as a producer of industrial videos, Karsh has gone into the cemetery business with a property called The Shrouds at Gravetech. The experience begins when a customer buys a burial plot for, say, a recently deceased loved one. The remains are carefully wrapped in a special shroud equipped with the very latest sensors and cameras, connected online to the company, and then interred on the company’s nicely landscaped property.
Using that setup, the survivors can view live video of the body as it goes through various stages—decomposition, etc.—in the ground, on their own computers or the handsomely mounted graveside monitors.
It’s at this point in the film that we ask: Can you run that by us again? You mean someone is willing to pay premium prices—Karsh’s cemetery is expensively decorated, and even boasts an on-site restaurant with eerie “corpse” sculptures—to bury someone in the ground, and then check in on the stiff from time to time? On video? Just to see how things are progressing? Who the hell would want to do that?
Karsh would. His late beloved partner Becca is buried there with tracking devices embedded in and around her remains, and he often visits her resting place on Shroudcam for a high-res view of her decaying body. Any prospective “corpse voyeur” could do the same with their own loved one, for a price. Business seems to be thriving at The Shrouds.
Despite the morbid atmosphere Karsh is surrounded by several friends and business associates when he isn’t zooming through the countryside in his luxury sports car (the film was shot in Cronenberg’s native province of Ontario, Canada).
Prominent among Karsh’s crowd is Becca’s sister Terry (Diane Kruger, who also portrays Becca in flashbacks), a dog groomer who’s obviously interested in the boss—although he doesn’t reciprocate. Terry mostly flutters around Karsh like the slo-mo moths in the film’s opening credits. She has sexual jealousy memories of him from before; he doesn’t seem to notice.
Terry’s ex, a seemingly amiable nerd named Maury (Guy Pearce) occasionally pops up too. Most curious of the hangers-on is Honey, Karsh’s AI assistant, sometimes a perky, inquisitive pixie, other times an animated koala, but always busy—perhaps too busily—meddling in Karsh’s affairs.
The emotional weather report for all these two-dimensional characters changes drastically when Karsh is introduced to a fellow entrepreneur named Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), a blind but very perceptive woman who runs her own cyber-graveyard in Budapest, Hungary. Through the worldly Soo-Min, Karsh gets up to speed on potential international rivals, including a Chinese mega-corporation and some teenage Russian hackers who may be behind the recent vandalism at Gravetech.
Cronenberg obviously delights in the unlikely setting of high-tech undertakers and overseas communist plots (we learn that the late Becca was once the victim of a Stalinist mind experiment) but mostly shuffles distractedly through Karsh’s living, breathing contemporaries. Cool, calm, collected Soo-Min is different.
The Shrouds, not one of the filmmaker’s most compelling outings, startles us with queasy-making imagery that gives way to a chilly quasi-love-story. Neither side compensates for, or even seems to understand, the other. Maybe there’s a pertinent narrative buried somewhere in the relationship of Karsh and Soo-Min. Finding it might take hard work. Keep digging.
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In theaters
