The Shrouds

Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a grieving widower, invents a piece of new technology so the bereaved can watch the decaying corpses of their loved ones. But when the grave of his wife (Diane Kruger) is desecrated, he goes in search of the culprit.

After nearly four decades, David Cronenberg returns to concerns he first addressed in his seminal work Videodrome (1983): VHS and the transformative furies of the human body. Here, grieving entrepreneur Karsh Relikh invents GraveTech, a contraption that permits the bereaved to observe the decaying corpses of their late loved ones – a video age version of a Baroque meditation tool where one would stare at a wooden miniature casket, with a grisly decomposed skeleton puppet inside. The micro-camera-studded shrouds used for this make the corpses somewhat like VHS tapes, with the graves becoming video players and the headstones TV sets.

When a cemetery with several GraveTech installations is desecrated, Relikh starts to believe that he’s becoming the focus of a conspiracy – while falling in love with his dead wife’s twin sister whose body he enjoys as a placebo of the one he lost… The Shrouds offers late stage Cronenberg at his finest: elegant and brainy, contemplative and wise, melancholic and melodramatic both in wryly minor keys – an artist reinvents himself once more.

– Olaf Möller

Trailer

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