WARNING: Spoilers ahead for ’The Shrouds’
The Shrouds, the new tech-noir thriller from writer/director David Cronenberg, stars Vincent Cassel as Karsh Relikh, CEO of GraveTech, a service providing smart cemeteries in which the deceased are wrapped in the eponymous shrouds, allowing mourners to follow their loved ones’ decomposition in real time via an app. The posthumous users include Karsh’s own beloved wife Becca (Diane Kruger), who is haunting his dreams. When the cemetery falls victim to a cyber attack, depriving customers of their *live* feeds, Karsh starts investigating. Aiding him is grubby programmer Maury (Guy Pearce), ex-husband of Becca’s twin sister Terry (also Kruger), and Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), a visually impaired business liaison who introduces Karsh to a web of possible explanations, including environmentalism, corporate espionage, and religious extremism.
The Shrouds is one of Cronenberg’s funniest films; surprising given it is a story about grief. Inspired by the loss of his own wife, it is also one of his most personal (Cassel here bears a more than passing resemblance to the director).
The film harks back to a late ‘90s vogue for ‘rubber reality’ sci-fi, which included The Matrix, The Truman Show, Dark City, and Cronenberg’s own eXistenZ. These films were made when the internet still played a minimal role in most people’s lives. In the years since, some of them became influential in the growth of online conspiracy culture. With The Shrouds Cronenberg demonstrates the influence of conspiracy culture upon sci-fi cinema.
In perhaps the film’s funniest scene, when Karsh has finished outlining some of his own theories to Terry, she announces that what he is saying “excites” her, leading to sex. This is almost a self-parody of Cronenberg’s past explorations of how humankind’s relationship with technology can change our relationships with each other, following video recording in Videodrome (1983), cars in Crash (1996), virtual reality in eXistenZ (1999), and biotech in Crimes of the Future (2022).
At one point the paranoid Maury lures Karsh to an off-grid, rural location so he can reveal to him what is really going on. The knowingly hackneyed setup is undercut by Karsh travelling to the rendezvous in a driverless Tesla car (the product placement is glaringly obvious). The scene which follows will be familiar to anyone who has met a conspiracy theorist: a byzantine narrative resembling a Cold War sci-fi yarn, complete with lazy racial stereotyping. Later Karsh asks Terry why - if conspiratorial talk turns her on - things fell apart with Maury. She says he was a “nut”. In other words, he actually believed what he was saying.
Despite its humour the film is elegiac in tone. As in much of Cronenberg’s previous work, the setting is urban, ultra-modern, geographically ambiguous. Although this futuristic milieu feels almost comfortingly retro now, its cold, hard surfaces perfectly belie the gradual erosion of what fragile boundaries remain around Karsh’s memories of Becca. In one scene he wraps himself in a shroud, wanting to understand how it feels to be dead.
Given its thriller vibe, most of the conversations in this very talky film are inhibited by secrecy, which make all the more unsettling Karsh’s banal interactions with Hunny, an AI secretary resembling Becca (and voiced by Kruger), something he only seems hazily aware of. He is similarly heedless in his ‘real life’ encounters with the enigmatic Soo-Min, a femme fatale who seems tailored to meet his libidinal fantasies just as Hunny is, particularly after he begins to suspect his wife was having an affair with her doctor.
In the opening scene Karsh is told by his dentist, “Grief is rotting your teeth.” When Karsh asks if this is a literal diagnosis, he gets an elliptical answer, indicative of where his attempts to find closure will always lead him. The more entangled he becomes with theories, the further he gets from being able to lay his mysteries to rest. There is a feeling that since the death of his wife Karsh has been alone, with his thoughts, memories, and dreams, and in a world where all lived experience is mediated through technology, designed to anticipate and grant your desires, it is likely he will remain so.
Whilst it is accepted that everyone deals with grief differently, the film asks how long it will be - once the process has been commodified by technology - before everyone grieves the same way. The mystery of who sabotaged Karsh’s graveyard, and why, remains unclear. Instead a range of different solutions are proposed, leaving you free to decide which, if any, is the ‘real’ one; the truth becomes something you can choose, depending on which version of it suits you best. Choose your reality preferences but choose them carefully. If you turn them off you may not wake up again.