«The Shrouds» - Movie Review by Kinoafisha
How people find different ways to cope with grief.
The provocative Canadian director has returned to Cannes with his new film "The Shrouds" once again showcasing how to adapt elements of body horror to the screen. The filmmaker vehemently denies belonging to this genre because his films always depict the beauty of the body inside (literally) and out, with nothing scary about it. An exceptional love for everything bodily in all its manifestations. Here's how "The Shrouds" transforms this idea in a new light.
At the center of the plot is businessman Karsh, whose beloved wife passed away a few years ago. To cope with his grief, he opens a cemetery with new technologies, where relatives of the deceased can monitor their loved ones via 3D cameras built right into the coffins. An app on the phone streams everything that happens to the bodies in high-quality 8K resolution. Well, people have different ways of dealing with grief.
Such a story for the film by David Cronenberg indeed emerged after the death of his beloved wife, who fought cancer for a long time. If you noticed a break in the director's career, it's solely because he spent many years caring for his wife during her battle with the terrible disease. He returned to the director's chair only a couple of years ago with the film "Crimes of the Future" which was also presented at Cannes. The Canadian filmmaker didn't know then whether he should continue making movies. He thought he would feel completely different on set and that he wouldn't like it.
However, the feelings remained the same, and the fears were unfounded. Cronenberg still enjoys making films, and he hasn't lost his directorial touch, which is why he returned with the new film "The Shrouds" which can be considered a kind of analysis of grief and the feeling of loss. Although the Canadian doesn't believe in art therapy, for him, art works in a completely different way. In principle, his films carry nothing therapeutic. It's more about playing with formats, shock value, and revealing the true nature of humanity.
"The Shrouds" is the quintessence of all the complex and stirring cinema of David Cronenberg. It includes body horror, trash philosophy, a kind of indirect flirtation with the audience, and the oddities of the human mind. The director indeed came up with the idea for the film while looking at his wife's grave and thinking about how much he wanted to be with her, to lie right next to her, but he didn't want to die.
Karsh is exactly the same. For this reason, he created a fashionable app with the help of Chinese developers, where people truly have the opportunity to be almost in the coffin with their loved ones. They see how their loved ones' bodies decompose every day, can zoom in on the image on the screen, and look at all the bones and tissue remnants. But why do they do this? For an ordinary person, it seems supremely immoral.
Karsh loved his wife inside and out. He was obsessed with every piece of her body, so he just couldn't physically part with it. When his wife comes to him in a dream, he desires her even without one breast and arm after surgery. Afraid that he might break her fragile ribs from the disease, Karsh still reaches out to hug her. Such strong feelings are not changed even by death.
However, this is just one side of the story about people coping with grief. The second part of the film interestingly explores another obsession—conspiracy theories. These are tangentially related to Karsh's business but mostly pertain to his wife's sister. She completely loses control when discussing the theories.
The thing is, the sister is also experiencing a kind of grief — the grief of a failed marriage. She didn't have a happy life with her husband, and the residue is still hard to shake off. So she dives headfirst into conspiracy theories and gets complete satisfaction from it. It's easier to believe in something completely strange and almost impossible than to dig into one's own feelings.
"The Shrouds" is a meta-complex work where Cronenberg's favorite themes—technology and the human body — intersect. If you're a fan of all this and eagerly await the Canadian's films, this picture will not leave you indifferent. After all, it's typical Cronenberg, exposing his own feelings on screen so sincerely for the first time.
