‘The Shrouds’ Review: David Cronenberg's Layered Rumination on Mortality
While the surface level of The Shrouds may appear complex, the film’s constant wrestling with the director’s own mortality ensures it will be remembered as one of David Cronenberg’s most engrossing efforts.
It’s difficult to put the visceral reaction I had while viewing David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds in words. Naturally, one’s gut feeling would be to forensically unpack what the Canadian filmmaker’s latest directorial effort means, notably analyzing its political themes and conspiracy angle, which take up a considerable amount of its 119-minute runtime (side note: this is Cronenberg’s longest-ever movie, and it’s still under two hours! Incredible). After all, the prevailing consensus when it comes to film appreciation nowadays is that one should attempt to understand what’s being shown, because one cannot be fully satisfied in their enjoyment of an object if they don’t “get it.”
What if I told you that there’s nothing to “get” out of The Shrouds and that the bulk of our appreciation of its text comes in confronting our subjective conception of mortality with Cronenberg’s own? A devout atheist who believes that there is no life after death, and that the body is only condemned to decompose until there’s nothing left, wrestles with the complex feelings he has in observing the love of his life become a prisoner of the Earth and being powerless to stop it from becoming nothing but bones, with none of the soul that made him fall in love with her. A body he loved to touch, feel, and smell can no longer move or do anything beyond “resting eternally,” and the memories he has of the time he spent with her are more convoluted than they are entirely positive.
Of course, by “resting eternally,” Cronenberg doesn’t mean anything in the spiritual sense of the term, but the literal one. There is nothing the body can do once it’s dead, and it’s what all of us are condemned to once “our time” is up. Through the figure of Karsh (Vincent Cassel), Cronenberg attempts to figure out what this life all means when our entire purpose is devoid of significance once we’re six feet underground, and the memories we’ve collected as human beings are no longer ours. That’s why it feels so fruitless to try to figure out what Cronenberg wants to say on Karsh uncovering a medical, and eventually political, conspiracy, involving the death of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), whose grave is the victim of a senseless attack at Karsh’s own cemetery.
Life is a series of finite memories. We are here on this planet only for a short time, until our body gives up to depart this plane of existence. For many nihilists, death is the primary reason why they believe life is meaningless, because no matter the connections we make, the personal accomplishments we achieve, the books we collect, and the impact we have on other people’s lives, we will all, in some shape or form, end up in the same place as everyone else and remember nothing else of our time once our eyes close and we stop breathing. It is the only certainty: we have individual, subjective stories and experiences, yet they mean nothing once we’re forced to spend eternity in a casket or an urn and become nothing.
Cronenberg is still reeling from the loss of his wife, who passed away in 2017, and with whom he spent over thirty years of his life. Thirty-eight to be exact. It’s hard to gauge which parts of the movie are based on his real life, and which are entirely fictional, but one can tell how much he still loves her and wishes for her body to be still alive and healthy, comforting him when he needs it the most, and continuing the connection they’ve always had ever since they tied the knot. Karsh still feels passionately about Becca, no matter how difficult the last part of their relationship was. Her cancer was spreading voraciously, and her body was slowly disintegrating. These moments, while deeply physically disturbing, are filled with so much melancholy that it becomes hard to look away, even when, as Karsh and Becca lock arms, bones break in front of his eyes, and Becca’s mind is slowly surrendering to her body.
As much as Karsh wants to hold on to Becca for as long as he can, he feels powerless to stop her body from decomposing in front of him. That’s why he begins to see conspiracies related to her death, either fed to him by Becca’s twin sister, Terry (also played by Diane Kruger), and her ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce), who helps him uncover a plot related to Becca’s grave being attacked related in a bizarre crime that makes far less sense as more is discovered about it. Yet, it doesn’t take long for us to realize that these conspiracies are nothing more than a coping mechanism for Karsh attempting to process his own grief, something he refuses to acknowledge. When his dentist tells him that “grief is rotting your teeth,” he tries to deflect the subject, and when he remembers the time he spent with his wife, nothing positive comes out of it. He only recalls his most regretful, remorseful, and disturbing moments with her.
It's a life filled with regret, and devoid of meaning, with the looming spectre of death staring at him much further in the face than before, especially when he continuously examines Becca’s decaying body from the “GraveTech” app he developed that allows him to do so. It’s no coincidence that Karsh has the same hairdo (and demeanor) as Cronenberg, because it’s the director reflected within the protagonist, who tries to make sense of something that does not make sense. Why do we live if we all die? Why must we die? And, more importantly, why should we continue with the time we had when everyone we loved most is gone and we’re the only ones left standing?
It wouldn’t surprise you that Cronenberg doesn’t have answers to any of the questions laid forward, but that doesn’t mean he won’t at least try to uncover something out of them. And what he lays out in front of us is uncomfortably confrontational. Rarely do we see a filmmaker talk about death this way and involve us in his endless talky ruminations on a world that’s purposefully designed to shield us from death. When someone dies, our gut reaction is to feel slightly sad and give words of comfort, but we tend to look the other way, because it isn’t happening to us. Yet, it will happen to us, and one should constantly think about this, even if it may not occur immediately.
It may be why some “stupid, ignorant” (this is Cronenberg’s words, not mine) critics dismissed The Shrouds as nothing more than a navel-gazing exercise in pretention, because they refused to engage in thinking about death. Because there’s nothing “pretentious” or “confounding” about urgently telling your audience they should reckon with the idea of dying and that, no matter how they will try as much as possible to stay on this Earth, their time will come, sooner or later. However, it’s understandable why some may feel discomfort in watching a movie that addresses the matter with such blunt force that the pessimistic, gloomy drive home becomes inescapable, and we’ll be forever rattled by what we’ve just seen (and heard).
The survival instinct will try to reject The Shrouds because we’re forced to ruminate on something we don’t want to ruminate on, even when people closest to us pass away. As nonsensical as the conspiracy looks, at face value, we begin to progressively realize that this entire angle is purposefully devoid of real meaning, because death is a conspiracy, grief is a conspiracy, and life is the biggest conspiracy of all. How many pseudo-documentaries are made on the concept of death, by theologians thinking they possess a greater understanding of a concept they know nothing of, only because they fear the unknown? We constantly question things we do not understand and our place on this planet – it’s part of our survival mechanism.
It’s why Karsh initially believes Terry and Maury, until he realizes this far-fetched plot is only bringing him more pain and sorrow when he should at least try to live the remainder of his time in peace. But will he, when everything, especially his newfound love interest, Soo-Min Szabo (Sandrine Holt), reminds him of Becca, and her decaying body? It’s hard to tell, but one should know that, after death, everything (and everyone) will remind you of the person you’ve just lost. The final shot, in particular, is the visual highlight of the movie, a haunting image that encapsulates everything Cronenberg wanted to discuss, distilled through one simple gesture. It’s difficult to come to terms with your “new life,” but it’s even harder to wallow in self-pity and think there is no reason why you’re still here when you’re going to die anyways.
What Cronenberg inspires in The Shrouds isn’t to think of life as some sort of grand conspiracy where everyone is out to get you, but to continuously encourage his audience to look at themselves and their bodies and understand that what they have now has an expiration date. Once it arrives, we shouldn’t be afraid, nor try to resist the end of a sequence of fleeting memories, but instead welcome this natural conclusion with open arms. No one is ready to die when it ultimately arrives, but it’s not up to us to decide when it’s our time. The only thing we can do now is accept it and enjoy the remainder of the time we have on this planet before our memories flash back in rapid succession, telling us that it’s all over and we must move on to a hopefully better place…