The concept of a camera placed in a coffin to record the doings of a dead person isn’t especially novel. It was utilized in Pupi Avati’s ZEDER (1983), and co-opted by David Cronenberg in THE SHROUDS (2024), a so-so film inspired by an actual occurrence: the 2017 death of Carolyn Zeifman, Cronenberg’s wife of 43 years.
THE SHROUDS (2024) Trailer
Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel, outfitted and made up to closely resemble the film’s creator) is a physician turned entrepreneur. He’s created a Toronto-based organization known as Gravetech, which involves a high-tech cemetery whose corpses can be viewed in their coffins on high resolution monitors set into the gravestones, in conjunction with a swanky restaurant and specially designed burial shroud fashion. The catalyst for Gravetech was Karsh’s wife Becca (Diane Krugar), whose death left him insanely grief-stricken.
Studying the “GraveCam” images, Karsh spots odd growths on Becca’s skeleton that her sister-in-law Terry (Krugar) claims are implanted surveillance cameras. Then the cemetery is vandalized by an unidentified someone, and Terry’s ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce), who does tech work for Karsh, grows increasingly jealous of his relationship with Terry. Karoly Szabo (Vieslav Krystyan), a Hungarian tech titan looking to open a Gravetech chapter in Budapest, and get buried there (with Karsh proclaiming “I want his rotting body in our cemetery”), comes to suspect that the GraveCam video feeds are being sabotaged by the Russians.
In the meantime, Karoly’s sexy wife Soo-min (Sandrine Holt) takes Karsh’s “neo-virginity,” and he follows this tryst with an affair with Terry. Karsh’s AI assistant Hunny behaves in an increasingly erratic manner, and Karsh comes to suspect that Maury’s jealousy, rather than foreign agitators, may be the culprit.
As in his previous film CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022), Cronenberg overloads the narrative with complex subplots, some of them more interesting than others. The political conspiracy and corporate espionage angles are dull, with Cronenberg’s wisest move being to continually return to Karsh’s grief about his deceased wife, who appears in periodic flashback-hallucinations that see Becca in various stages of amputation. This plot strand is incorporated into the conclusion in especially memorable fashion.
What’s missing in this brooding, intellectually grounded exercise is the visceral charge of Cronenberg’s 1970s and 80s films. There’s plenty of Cronenbergian grotesquerie but it lacks the demented exhilaration of the exploding head in SCANNERS (1981) and the stomach fissure in VIDEODROME (1983). Even the copious nudity by Diane Krugar, and a more-graphic-than-average sex scene that directly recalls a similar sequence in CRASH (1996), fail to elicit much of a charge. Another problem: the shroud suits, the film’s most striking elements, are severely underutilized.
THE SHROUDS at least looks good, with Douglas Koch adroitly replicating the illustrative lighting of Cronenberg’s previous cinematographer of choice Peter Suschitzky. In the lead roles, Vincent Cassel and Diane Krugar are strong (despite the fact that both speak in oft-indecypherable accents), and the supporting cast, comprised of seasoned Canadian performers like Sandrine Holt and Jennifer Dale, is adequate.
Vital Statistics
THE SHROUDS
SBS Productions/Prospero Pictures/Saint Laurent
Director: David Cronenberg
Producer: Said Ben Said, Martin Katz, Anthony Vaccarello
Screenplay: David Cronenberg
Cinematography: Douglas Koch
Editing: Christopher Donaldson
Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders, Jennifer Dale, Eric Weinthal, Jeff Yung, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Vieslav Krystyan, Matt Willis, Steve Switzman, Victoria Fodor, Jill Niedoba