14/19
It’s a return to doing something
Synopsis
Karsh, an innovative businessman and grieving widower, builds a device to connect with the dead inside a shroud. Quoted in Film Junk Podcast: Episode 961: In a Violent Nature + TIFF 2024 (2024). Compared to the mediocre “Crimes of the Future,” Cronenberg’s previous effort and return to the body horror subgenre that made him famous, “The Shrouds” was a success. acceptable might be the right word?
I defy you to actually care about any of the answers surrounding the many mysteries at the heart of “The Shrouds”
But as with the previous film, in almost every scene of “The Shrouds” you’ll probably think of another similar Cronenberg film that, quite possibly, did better. You might, in particular, remember the fantastic “Crash,” which dealt with similar themes of macabre voyeurism and sexual fascination with death, physical corruption, and injury in a much more memorable way. It’s the curse of older, more established filmmakers that their latest works are constantly compared to their earlier masterpieces, but it’s also inevitable when said filmmakers are so clearly out of ideas in “Crimes of the Future”, it literally goes nowhere, there’s no big deal: it’s just an epiphenomenon to play with more fundamental themes. But it’s still tiring to follow our rather bland protagonist through some sort of investigation that becomes more and more tedious by the minute.
What bothers me most is how the protagonist never feels like himself
What matters is the psyche of our protagonist, which is made clear by the opening scene (and I imagine the last, which had a section of the packed auditorium laughing at its rather spectacular fall of the story into the middle of nowhere). These two scenes work to convey the idea that the story is really about grieving the loss of a loved one, which makes sense given that Cronenberg drew inspiration from his wife’s death to invent the story. Yet, once again, it all feels like a late variation (if not an outright repetition) of things Cronenberg has already done and said, rather than a new, late take on these same themes. he’s genuinely disturbed in his psychic depths by what’s happening to him; Vincent Cassel, who is certainly the equivalent of James Woods or James Spader, is quite good as the chilly tech entrepreneur with a passion for minimalism and crypto-necrophilia, but when it comes to expressing any kind of compulsion and fascination, there’s simply too little to sustain the film.
Perhaps even worse, his supposed fascination never feels real, authentic, all-consuming
There is no descent into the dark side for our hero, no journey through the uncharted and gross swamps of his soul – or contemporary society. How the other pole of the director’s work, technology, is never really addressed. His best horror films explore the collective unconscious and how we humans relate to technology. How there is no real opposition between the organic and the machine but a real symbiosis coming.
Nothing like that here, with an interesting premise that is never really explored
How we understand our unconscious instincts and desires to reclaim, merge and do unspeakable things with our gadgets. With cell phones, self-driving Teslas and a personal artificial intelligence it just feels like controlling banal boxes. The AI assistant part of the plot should, like so many other things, have been elaborated, although I get the idea: behind our machinery and seemingly autonomous technology, there are us and our unconfessed and shameful desires. It’s a shame that “The Shrouds” decides to remain on the surface rather than dig up the corpses that haunt our fantasies.