Phantasmal Gallery
Phantasmal Gallery
Thoughts On The Shrouds
Lara Abbey​
Still from "The Shrouds" By David Cronenburg 2024
Body horror auteur David Cronoberg’s latest feature is a disquieting mediation on
grief, technology, and conspiracy.
The film follows widower Karsh (Vincent Cassel) a Tech CEO who has invented a
technology allowing for loved ones of the deceased to view a livestream of their
remains via their smartphone. We meet him four years after the death of his wife,
Becca (played by Diane Krueger - who triples as Becca’s identical sister, Terry, and
the voice of Karsh’s AI assistant, Hunny). After the destruction of several graves in
the specialised cemetery that Karsh owns, including Becca’s, we see the film
gradually set its sights on a series of convoluted (and entirely theoretical) plots
against Karsh and his business.
Although the film is fairly austere and slow-paced, with sleek interiors and a
dialouge-driven plot, the insanity and complexity of the conspiracy angle offsets
this spareness of form. At first, its environmental groups that defaced the graves, then it’s Karsh’s former brother-in-law (jealous of Karsh’s relationship with Terry, his ex-wife), then that same brother-in-law implicates both the Russian and Chinese governments. Ultimately, this mystery (alongside several others) are never
solved, and the whole affair acts as a pretty strong metaphor for loss and grief – a
desperate attempt to find answers for what is ultimately unanswerable
Still from "The Shrouds" By David Cronenburg 2024
There’s also much to be said on how technology and the demands that we place on others figure into the film. The idea of a dead body being visible ‘on-demand’
refutes the belief of ‘resting in peace’ held by many cultures and religions. In the
middle of the film, Karsh even says ‘I want his rotting body in our cemetery’, in
reference to a high-profile CEO who wishes to be buried in (and sponsor) one of
Karsh’s new graveyards in Budapest. This line takes it even further and
demonstrates that, in late capitalism, even the dead are commodified.
There’s also a gendered aspect to these heightened expectations as well. In a meta
sense, Diane Kruger’s multi-roling forces her to play different roles for Karsh - the
wife, the emotional support (later becoming the lover), and the fount of all
knowledge with Hunny. Her scenes as Becca, appearing within Karsh’s nightmare,
are particularly striking. We see Karsh lying in bed, with her standing nude in front
of him on her way to an appointment with her doctor. Each time she returns, a
different part of her body is missing – her breast, her arm. They even attempt to
have sex, causing Becca to break her hip. These sequences demonstrate the
expectation that women, even when facing death, please the men around them.
Returning to Hunny, the fact that she was installed with a dead Becca's voice
provides another example of technology being used to prevent the dead from
properly resting. In addition, her presence points towards the fact that, even within
the most advanced technology, it's still up to women to play a support role - as
we’ve seen in the past year through the proliferation of AI chatbots and companions
this past year, where real-life women have been replaced by lines of code.
The Shrouds is an eerie and intimate exploration of loss, that slowly but surely
plunges you into the very depths of grief.
