David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds” opens on an elegant man named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) having lunch with a woman, whom he soon asks about darkness. Can she handle things dark? The line feels like a joke pitched at the filmmaker’s admirers, who have followed him down many twisted corridors, in movies that plumb anxieties of the blending of our bodies with our technology. Fusing high concepts with unforgettable gore, he’s become a hero to eggheads and horror hounds alike.
Karsh is the inventor of GraveTech, a cemetery in which graves are outfitted with cameras that allow people to watch footage of the bodies of loved ones from within the tombs. Think a baby camera, or a Ring doorbell, for corpses. On his phone, Karsh can look upon the skeleton of his wife in her coffin whenever he chooses. Her skull is but a click of an app away. The visualization of that skull—macabre yet serene and sanitized—is among the film’s most haunting flourishes. Everything is product. But “The Shrouds” doesn’t feel reactionary exactly. Product can be comforting.
As with the premise of Cronenberg’s controversial “Crash,” which pivoted on people’s sexual arousal by car accidents, the knee-jerk response to the possibility of GraveTech is plausibly one of ‘Why in the hell would anyone want to do that?’ And that kind of question can separate viewers from Cronenberg’s films. Occasionally even this viewer: I found his last movie, “Crimes of the Future,” to be absurd. This notion of GraveTech, however, strikes me as resonantly bonkers.
Grief is odd and poignant and obnoxious and unpredictable and thusly virtually impossible to dramatize in art. People who’ve just lost their spouses have called me at a theater box office to quarrel about the prices of tickets. A close relative insisted on watching his mother as she was cremated. Death, like sex, takes us closer than usual to the irrational animal state that we like to suppress with social conventions. In other words, Cronenberg’s comfort with audaciously WTF conceits and symbols is likely to get him closer to truths of death and sex than many more conventional artists.
Karsh’s date goes about as well as any date that ends in a cemetery over a wife’s grave with her decomposing skeleton visible on both a phone and a tombstone could. An air of dry and despairing comedy runs under this scene, and throughout “The Shrouds” at large, like a fine, electrified wire. Karsh’s date is initially indistinguishable from a business lunch, as Cronenberg has a fabulous ear for how corporate jargon seeps into our lives, especially as we’ve gotten older and established and guarded.
The tombstones embody insidious corporate culture as well: they are sleek and impersonal, suggesting large iPhones in the ground with a camera above the deceased’s name. The tombstones are beautiful and ghastly and point towards how the digitalization of our culture is rapidly extending to every fiber of our lives, however sacred or profane. The look and sound of this film—hushed, elegant, almost perversely attractive and restrained in the service of maintaining innuendo, like a waiting room at an expensive doctor’s office—is the wellspring of its meaning.
“The Shrouds” is a thorny and moving piece of cinema, but you cannot take its plot literally if you hope to get out of it alive. Several graves at GraveTech are vandalized and, given how controversial such a service would prove to be if utilized, there is no shortage of suspects, from religious figures to corporate competitors. This potential conspiracy pivots on Karsh’s relationship with his deceased wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), Becca’s sister, Terry (Kruger again), and Terry’s ex-husband, Maury (Guy Pearce), who set up much of the expensive tech in Karsh’s life, including a Siri-like personal assistant, Hunny, who is voiced by, you guessed it, Diane Kruger.
There are doctors. They are Chinese and Russian business interests, who may or may not have gained a foothold in Karsh’s home. There are growths on Becca’s skeleton, which may or may not be real. There is a new lover for Karsh, Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), who may of course be a double or triple agent. Be warned now: Cronenberg does not offer a solution to this mystery, which is even more convoluted than I’m suggesting here. As in other Cronenberg films, as in most Cronenberg films in fact, the solution to the mystery here matters much less than said mystery’s ability to swallow characters alive.
Do notions of “real” and “unreal” make a whiff of a difference in “Videodrome,” “Naked Lunch,” or “Existenz?” Even “Crash,” which feigns objectivity, ends with characters succumbing to their obsession. Karsh, whose name suggests a Ballard or Kafka protagonist, is plagued by nightmares driven by longing and survivor’s guilt and who knows what else. Maybe the violation of GraveTech is real, but it’s definitely an embodiment of his anxiety over profiting from his inability to leave his wife in the past. As has been widely reported, Cronenberg lost his wife of over 40 years to cancer a few years ago. It’s hardly a coincidence that Becca was lost the same way.
There are scenes in “The Shrouds” that are as daring and personal as any in the Cronenberg canon, particularly a nightmare in which Karsh and Becca try to have sex without breaking her brittle bones. Cronenberg and Kruger make us explicitly aware of Becca’s vulnerability: her fear of dying which is woven with the mental and emotional distance and humiliation that a failing body can bring into a relationship.
That this empathy exists in Karsh’s nightmare either speaks well of him or signals his further descent into a hall of mirrors and fantasy. Becca is everywhere. When Karsh and Terry inevitably fall into bed, the sister’s emotional pain becomes as explicit as Becca’s has been, and she taunts Karsh with her similarities to her sister.
Such intimate, wrenching, taboo moments are the heart of “The Shrouds.” When the characters talk about the plot, which they do a lot, they are attempting to distance themselves, digest these searing moments that gurgle up from the subconscious unpredictably. When a Cronenberg film is working, the crisp, dry, clinical way that he has his characters speak of profound atrocity can be funny and moving, illuminating submerged feeling. When a Cronenberg film isn’t working, such dialogue can be tedious.
I’m not going to say that “The Shrouds” is without tedium because it isn’t—it’s an obstinate movie. But Cronenberg earns the leeway he asks of his audience. The inability of this mystery to cohere is the shapelessness felt by anyone who knows loss.
This weekend, the third entry in George Lucas’ trilogy of “Star Wars” prequels, “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” returns to theaters for its 20th anniversary. I will say about this movie what I said in 2005: it is ambitious, well-designed, and kinetic. You don’t have to be a psychic to discern the Lucas of “THX-1138” and “American Graffiti” here. The film’s positive qualities tend to be overshadowed, of course, by the fact that it is one of most wooden American movies that I have ever seen.
Lucas is hopeless at getting characters to utter anything tangibly human here, and the numbing obviousness of the dialogue serves to remind you that in most movies even bad dialogue has subtext. Lucas can’t show Natalie Portman being heartbroken; he has her say “I’m heartbroken” before having her character die of a…broken heart.
And yet, I like to remind people that movies are more than dialogue, or should be.
“Revenge of the Sith” has a sleek “Amazing Comics” style, by way of the aesthetics of ancient Rome and feudal Japan, which has aged well given the clutter of most modern blockbusters. The action here is sharper than that of any of the movies of the overly beloved OG trilogy; you don’t notice because it involves variables rather than characters.
These movies are about democracy giving way to fascism, as orchestrated by a con man who knows how to circumvent rationality with emotion. Meanwhile, the Jedi, the good guys, are hopeless prigs blind to what’s about to happen to them. Give Lucas credit where due: these implications take cojones, and have lasting significance. What were those J.J. Abrams movies about besides brand management?
“Revenge of the Sith” isn’t convincing when people are talking, yet certain set pieces have operatic impact. A moment of the Emperor, finally in the open, tearing the seats of the senate to pieces while Yoda crouches is powerful enough to make up for what the dialogue lacks. And wonderments abound throughout the movie, such as General Grievous, a blend of robot and alien that suggests a metal scorpion with a human heart.
Lucas’ meanings would’ve hit harder if he’d found a way to make Anakin’s transformation into Darth Vader an emotionally vivid tragedy. But Lucas’ lack of sentimentality chills you. This is the End of America writ large in blockbuster font, connected to the end of empires past. No wonder that a recent movie by Lucas’ friend, Francis Ford Coppola, felt redundant. Lucas beat Coppola to “Megalopolis” by 20 years.
“The Shrouds” is now playing at Movieland, while “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” is in theaters everywhere. It is also streaming with the rest of the “Star Wars” bric-a-brac on Disney +.
