Aisles of locked plastic cabinets in drug stores. Audiologists in the UK whose videos of cleaning skin and wax out of patients’ ears amass millions of views. James Woods, who starred in Videodrome as a man who was sent hallucinations by a CIA cutout, claimed a photo of a crowd gathered to see Kamala Harris was AI generated because one man had a very long neck. While none of these things have appeared in David Cronenberg’s films, they’re all reminiscent of the darkly comic, clinical, technoskeptic essence of his work. Cronenberg never set out to predict the future, but here we are, 26 years after eXistenZ—a film that clocked the immersiveness of video games and the fanaticism of gamer culture—living through the inevitable perils of the technological extension of the human mind and body. His adaptation of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis was shot shortly before the Occupy Wall Street protests began. A study that revealed we’re full of microplastics came out several days before Crimes of the Future, in which evolution and eating plastic play crucial roles, was released. We’re getting closer to the Cronenberg singularity.
The prescience and encroaching dystopia is hard to see behind the Cronenberg Brand. As Kiddle, an online encyclopedia for kids, will tell you, Cronenberg is the progenitor of “body horror.” (Unfortunately, Kiddle does not define body horror, but I’m sure that you, an adult, will be familiar with the term.) However, viewing his work through the narrow lens of this dubious subgenre fails to appreciate the more crucial aspects of it: the beauty, the effusive and subversive sexuality, the profound sadness, the Freudian, the perils of pure rationality, the conspiratorial. It’s this last element that, along with anal sex, will likely drive future chatter about his latest film, The Shrouds. Conspiratorial thinking isn’t caused by mental illness or stupidity, but is simply a manifestation of the human desire to make order out of chaos and the unknown—the folly of over-rationalization. Technology, in our world and the world of the film, functions as an accelerant for that desire, generating even more chaos in return.
But conspiracy is merely part of The Shrouds’ engaging, seductive surface, and looking beyond its obvious parallels with our political climate unlocks more disconcerting truths inside. Like Crimes of the Future, the protagonist here is made up to resemble Cronenberg, and both characters’ respective professions are meant to evoke the auteur’s long filmmaking career. Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassell) is a widower who, at his wife’s funeral, felt the desire to “jump into the coffin with her” so she wouldn’t be alone—something Cronenberg himself felt at the funeral of his wife, Carolyn Zeifman, who died in 2017. Neither Cronenberg nor his fictional avatar shy away from this painful feeling. Karsh is the founder of GraveTech, a company that puts dead bodies inside a suit made of microcameras and lays them to rest in proprietary cemeteries so their loved ones can watch them, at any time, at any angle, moulder away in their plots. Despite the fixation on his wife’s bones, Karsh has been dating, but without much success, precisely because of the bone-fixation. The film opens with Karsh’s date with a woman who gags and starts housing a cig after Karsh shows her his dead and decaying wife. He’s too preoccupied with zooming and panning the image to notice that she’s gone; the allure of the familiar, and of reclaiming what has been lost, overpowers his desire to move on.
Such romantic misadventures don’t recede into the background. The Shrouds is unapologetically about an elderly widower attempting to end his “neo-virginity” and avoid, in his words, “sink[ing] gracefully into terminal asexuality.” This aspect of mourning the end of a decades-long relationship, of a life partner, has never been treated with such care, humor, and brutalizing candor. While Cronenberg’s work is often dismissed as dispassionate and sterile—largely because it’s overtly premised on philosophical concepts and questions of identity, as well as the subdued performances of its actors—the core simmers.
That Cronenberg’s experience as a widower serves as the basis of The Shrouds harkens back to his last overtly autobiographical film, which was also based on the end of a marriage: The Brood (1980). Rather than a tragic end of a beautiful romance, The Brood is a wild dramatization of his divorce from his first wife and the fight over custody of their daughter. Nola (Samantha Eggar), the ex-wife in The Brood, is antagonistic both consciously and subconsciously. Her doctor’s experimental approach to therapy has made her rage physical, and it manifests as small, bloodthirsty creatures that exact revenge on people who have wronged (or seem to have wronged) her. Despite the outright ugliness of certain scenes—such as when Cronenberg’s fictional counterpart strangles Nola—Nola is shown to be more victim than victimizer. Though her tormenters don’t necessarily deserve the death penalty, the film’s emotional rawness—something like compassion—extends to both parties. She’s angry for all the right reasons, and so is he. Both parents wrestle for control, but the film’s final moments make clear that they’re powerless, and that their child will be the one who bears the brunt of their failure.
Like The Brood, The Shrouds shows that nothing about learning to function without the person you thought you’d spend the rest of your life with is emotionally straightforward. Even Karsh’s torturous dreams about his wife Becca (Diane Krueger), in which he relives the trauma of the cancer that killed her, are sexually charged: she appears in the bedroom that they shared completely nude, save for an electronic collar that summons her to the hospital for more intrusive medical procedures. Every part of her is being amputated or altered, stolen away from him, not her. During one dream, she breaks a hip as they cuddle. Making such intimacy—at once comfortable and agonizing—is about as far from the standard dead-wife flashbacks as one can get. The futile longing in these dreams is multifold: Karsh wishes Becca were alive, yet can only envision her suffering through pain he cannot alleviate. He wishes to maintain that familiarity and connection through GraveTech’s ShroudCam, but it is insufficient. Karsh appears more than once sitting in the bath of the apartment he bought after selling his marital home. Though he’s mindlessly scrolling on his iPad, being immersed in warm water is the closest thing a single person who’s living alone (and not dating) will come to a sensuous embrace. This, like ShroudCam, is a pale imitation. “I lived in Becca’s body. It was the only place I really lived,” Karsh says early on. “Her body was … the world. The meaning and the purpose of the world. I don’t think I can really explain it.”
But our man makes it in the end—an ending that’s poignant, numinous, disconcertingly erotic, laugh-out-loud funny, and genuinely surprising. The means by which Karsh gets to a place where he can embark on a new relationship, whether purely sexual or sexual and romantic, is through conspiracy. After noticing some odd growths on his wife’s bones, his cemetery is attacked by unknown assailants who vandalize nine graves, including Becca’s. Karsh turns to his wife’s identical twin, Terry (Diane Krueger), a veterinarian-turned-dog-groomer who finds conspiracy theories arousing, for her medical knowledge and the familiarity with the lore. She has long believed there was something suspicious about Becca’s treatment, so much so she wasn’t allowed in the same room as the doctors. He also seeks the counsel of Terry’s ex-husband Maury (nebbish-mode Guy Pearce), a deeply paranoid sadsack who helped program GraveTech’s tech and created Karsh’s AI assistant, Hunny (also Diane Krueger, also identical to his dead wife). Within this perverse setup of paranoids and doubles, Karsh begins to investigate the possible perpetrators and his wife’s improbable neoplasms, and almost immediately concludes that these were not discrete events or mere coincidence. The “how” and the “why” of their connection—the endless suppositions that make conspiracy theories so much fun as a form of vernacular creativity, an exquisite corpse of sorts—remain baffling and indeterminate. Naturally, Terry and Maury are eager collaborators. Terry’s enthusiasm for cracking things wide open inevitably leads to a sexual relationship with Karsh—yet when Maury confronts them about sleeping together, they both tell him he’s nuts. This refusal to acknowledge a conspiracy, or the correctness of a madman, when it exists comically points to the futility of their investigations—and any we might be pursuing.
Putting aside the messy reality of hooking up with your dead wife’s identical twin and pissing off her ex (whose programming knowledge you can’t reliably get elsewhere), Karsh’s embrace of conspiracy isn’t simply a symptom of our times. The conspiracy about the vandals and nodules on Becca’s bones supplants and transforms the pain of losing his wife. By theorizing about what caused the growths, Karsh elevates his wife’s relevance. More than the remains of a sensual, loving wife who was deeply important to him, Becca’s body becomes the site of international intrigue. He regains control, albeit in a way that’s profoundly flawed. Terry asserts that Becca was being pushed into experimental treatment by her oncologist (and ex-lover) Dr. Jerry Eckler; Karsh agrees and proclaims that whatever Dr. Eckler was doing was also borderline unethical. The not-so-good doctor dated Becca while she was his student in college, a transgression that Karsh rightly notes would not be tolerated today. The anger Karsh felt about Eckler “having” Becca’s body before him festers. Sadness is supplanted by rage and suspicion.
What exacerbates these feelings is Karsh’s inability to confront him. Dr. Eckler disappeared after going to a medical conference in Reykjavik, and nobody knows where he is. (Dr. Eckler is recently divorced, making him another “brother in sorrow” like Maury and Karsh.) But it’s Hunny, Karsh’s AI assistant, who provides the bridge to connect Becca with the vandalism: she tells him (with wildly inappropriate erotic charge) that all nine people whose graves were vandalized were under the care of Dr. Eckler. This information spins up the possibility of lots of new conspirators: the Chinese government, which has a controlling interest in Shining Cloth, the firm that created GraveTech’s shrouds; and the Russians, because, well, it’s the Russians. Or maybe it’s the Russians fighting the Chinese, or vice-versa. Or maybe they’re collaborating. The reason for attempting to infiltrate GraveTech, however, is extremely tenuous: the mysterious They wish to create a surveillance network, a mesh of meshes, even though Karsh and less stricken characters note that there are thousands of other networks to choose from. The conspiracy makes no sense, but that’s no reason to quit digging.
Whoever is doing this becomes far more menacing when Hunny, an idealized, controllable version of his wife—the sexy helpmate—appears to him as a mutilated version of Becca from his dream. Rather than merely supposing his home and access to information might’ve been compromised, Karsh takes it as hard evidence that shadowy, unbelievably powerful external forces are working against him. This narrative only spirals outward from there, becoming less coherent as this is a genuinely inexplicable event. Did Karsh really see what he thought he saw? What other bad information, courtesy of Hunny or his own mind, is he working with? As Karsh goes deeper down the rabbit hole, the reverence for his wife turns to disgust. Karsh first ponders, then firmly believes, that Becca was having an affair with Dr. Eckler. Instead of an unwitting guinea pig, Becca deserved to be tested upon because she cheated. By extension, her slow and painful death wasn’t an accident of biology but rather divine punishment for her transgression.
This sense of betrayal and anger, immature as it is, mirrors parts of the grieving process: rage towards the deceased is a means of regaining control, just like the crafting of conspiracies; it also provides a welcome break from (or means of masking) unrelenting sorrow. As Hunny’s existence implies, the quiet and devoted Karsh has always wanted to exert control over Becca. Love isn’t strictly a beautiful thing. This range—beautiful, irrational, nasty—is reminiscent of the struggle in William S. Burroughs’s Queer. (Luca Guadagnino’s movie cheerily elides it, sorely missing the point.) There are no accidents in conspiracy theories, only more steps that make the person(s) generating it feel more special for decoding. Becca’s death was a punishment for—or maybe even caused by—her consorting with Dr. Eckler. Her death goes from tragedy to just desserts. When Dr. Eckler appears to have been buried in a grave next to Becca’s, Karsh darkly says to Terry: “I have another theory. I paid to have Eckler killed. And had him buried here myself, for what he did to Becca. I gave her to him … because she betrayed me with him, and I don’t want her anymore.”
Such feelings likely sound outlandish to those who’ve never suffered the death of a loved one. But grief does strange, terrible things, perhaps in part because it is unrelenting. Layering it on top of sexual/romantic longing, which also provokes exuberant irrationality, strips away the millennia-old lie that men are inherently more rational and less emotional than women. Many of Cronenberg’s films can be understood as the Zizian-esque mania of unbridled rationalism, like the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers. Karsh’s conspiracy-mongering—coolly solving the mystery, like a private eye in a film noir—is the lie he tells himself to preserve his self-worth. He feels, but is afraid to feel too much; why not blame the Russians instead? His carnal desires and petty grievances are profound, even though he’s just as much of a schmuck as Maury.
However, The Shrouds doesn’t end with Karsh’s rationalized fabulism or pure hatred for Becca. Soo-min Szabo (Sandrine Holt), the wife of a terminally ill industrialist, meets with Karsh because her husband wants to be buried in a shroud in his Hungarian homeland. This offers Karsh an exciting opportunity to franchise, but more crucially presents him a double of himself and not his wife, another person suffering through the loss of their partner to cancer. Soo-min largely remains outside of the paranoid world Karsh and Terry are constructing, and their relationship largely blossoms outside of the film’s narrative. In the film’s final moments, Karsh and Soo-min walk arm-in-arm to her private plane, which is bound for Hungary—save for one quick layover in Reykjavik. Karsh falls asleep during the flight, and when he wakes up he sees Soo-min turned away from him. When he reaches out to touch her, she reveals that she’s been mutilated in the same way Becca is in his dreams. Soo-min alternates between being Becca and herself, revealing that it’s not simply the body that has been fused, but the soul. Karsh has refused Becca his body, but she will always have his soul. Instead of his physical remains, Karsh lays his resentment and grief to rest in the plot next to his wife’s. His future is as beautiful and eerily indeterminate as the final shot in the film: Soo-min’s private plane flying high above the clouds towards a bruise-colored sunset.
But that’s just Karsh. The Shrouds may be Cronenberg’s meditation on his own grief, but he’s piled two other bodies in Becca’s grave: that of his filmmaking career (he’s hinted that this will be his last film) and cinema itself. While the death of cinema has been announced so frequently over the past few decades that even repeating it is a little like beginning a speech with Webster’s definition of a word, the most striking images—and the primal scene of all this conflict, physical or metaphysical—are the GraveTech headstones with screens in them. Unlike a smartphone, they’re designed to fulfill one function and purpose: to watch. Even though you can zoom and pan over your loved one’s remains, it’s a fundamentally passive technology.
Cronenberg has been profoundly unsentimental about the death of celluloid to an outright trollish extent: at the 2018 Venice Film Festival, he said he enjoyed viewing Lawrence of Arabia on his Apple Watch; more recently, he pissed off 35mm fans by saying “there’s zero reason to use film.” I have no desire to weigh in on the correctness or incorrectness of these statements, or whether or not they’re exaggerations, but they are in line with Cronenberg’s love of gears, gadgets, and a McLuhanite view of technology. All things must pass, including the artistic medium he’s worked in for his entire adult life. Our nostalgia and sentimentality belong in the graveyard. TikTok—and whatever short-form video platforms that come after it—will exist alongside our memories and fondness for Cronenberg’s work. While this sounds like a rather trite point, it’s Cronenberg’s to make, one shaped by many years of carefully considering and recontextualizing our world and our basest impulses. One of the strangest people I’ve ever worked with told me death is a great teacher, and I’ll be goddamned if he wasn’t right. The wisdom contained in The Shrouds is profound.