After Maps to the Stars in 2014, David Cronenberg went nearly a decade without making a film. At the time, he said, “I just don’t feel I need to do another movie just to do a movie […] That’s the thing: Every time you go on the set, as you get older, you think: ‘Will I have the energy? Will I have the will?’ It’s tough. Physically sometimes it’s tough. But I had no problem [on Maps to the Stars].” After directing a film every two or three years for four decades, maybe he’d begin to follow Stanley Kubrick’s pace. He hinted at retirement this year: “We all have some kind of arrogance, but I don’t have that much. The world does not need my next movie […] Directing is physical and it really takes it out of you. You could certainly imagine a moment where you’re halfway through a movie and you say, ‘I actually can’t do this anymore. I’m not focused enough to be good at it. I don’t even know if I can survive today.’”
He hedges: “Then again, there’s Manoel de Oliveira, the Portuguese director who was still making films at 103 [...] Now that is something to aspire to.” Cronenberg will never retire. In fact, he might be adapting his 2014 novel Consumed very soon. “It wouldn’t be cheap, it takes place in four countries, so of course we can’t tell right now. But that’s where it might go.” Gotta go somewhere. The Shrouds is Cronenberg’s mourning work, a quasi-autobiographical film starring French doppelgänger Vincent Cassel as an entrepreneur who designs and sells digital graves where people can buy plots and watch their loved ones decompose. Cassel’s wife, Diane Kruger (who also plays her sister), appears in dreams as she dies of cancer—and as an AI assistant named “Hunny.”
She gets hacked eventually and “dies” too, mutilated by Guy Pearce, the former brother-in-law and co-worker turned schizoid conspiracy case with a chip on his shoulder about his divorce… from Diane Kruger, the other one, the sister-in-law. You think it’s not going to be very Crown International, and then it is. In any case, a series of attacks and hacks do take place, but entirely off screen. In The Shrouds, the audience sees none of the action: we don’t see the wife die, we don’t see the GraveTech vandalism, we never even see the ostensible villain, someone named Jerry Eckler, until he’s already buried in the ground, next to Kruger in the plot Cassel saved for himself. We don’t see the mysterious burial and reburial in the night—nights, reburials. The Shrouds is a film of conversations, a movie where people talk about the plot second hand.
At two hours, it sags; this is Cronenberg’s best film since A History of Violence, but it could’ve used less paranoid jawing and more dead-wife scenes. The one in the middle, where Kruger emerges from the bathroom with her left arm and left breast amputated, is one of the most moving scenes of Cronenberg’s career. She looks at him. “Am I too mutilated? Do you still desire me?” Without missing a beat: “I still do.” They try to make love, but Kruger’s hip breaks, her bones “like brittle glass.” And then we’re back in the semi-chic cafe overlooking the GraveTech plots, more conversation, more grief that’ll never go away.
Grief is a universal experience, but no one’s grief is exactly the same. That’s enough of a “premise” to sustain a movie to my mind; but The Shrouds could’ve been even greater if Cronenberg opened up more: less meaningless exposition, more dead-wife.
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