[COLUMN] The Shrouds Contemplates Body Horror Without the Body | by Darren Mooney

Note: David Cronenberg’s latest film, The Shrouds, is now available streaming on Criterion and on video on demand. The Shrouds isn’t really a movie with a plot, so it’s hard to really spoil it, but this piece will discuss the movie in depth. It’s a weird, gentle, thoughtful movie that is more of a “vibe” than anything else.

David Cronenberg is best known as one of the guiding lights of the body horror subgenre, in large part thanks to his work on classics like Videodrome, The Fly and The Naked Lunch. However, this tendency to fixate on Cronenberg’s graphic and grotesque imagery often obscures the reality that this body horror often exists as an expression of something more profound and psychological. The body is merely the physical manifestation of something much less tangible.

Freud haunts Cronenberg’s work. Rabid, his fourth film, features a copy of The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, a biography written by Freud’s contemporary Ernest Jones. The Brood focuses on a new form of psychoanalysis pioneered by Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), which causes his patient's (Samantha Eggar) sublimated rage to literally birth itself from her body. It’s a surprise that it took Cronenberg so long to make A Dangerous Method, a biography of Freud (Viggo Mortensen).

Cronenberg returns repeatedly to characters manifesting their ideas into the world, often as an extension of their physical selves. In Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg manifests the creative process as the physical extraction of an object from the artist’s body, literalizing the idea of willing an extension of one’s self into being. As visceral as Cronenberg’s imagery might be, the flesh is often just a canvas upon which the soul might be rendered, an external expression of an internal horror.

This is part of what makes The Shrouds so interesting. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to a polite-but-muted response. It was perhaps overshadowed by the more traditional and more exaggerated body horror of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a film which critics claimed “out-Cronenbergs Cronenberg” and was “more Cronenbergian than Cronenberg himself”, and which went on to secure a Best Picture nomination and gross over $77 million.

In contrast, The Shrouds lingered in limbo for the better part of a year. Cronenberg had originally conceived of The Shrouds as a television series at Netflix, but “got two episodes into it when they decided not to do it anymore.” Cronenberg reconfigured the concept into a film, which premiered at Cannes in May 2024. Even then, Cronenberg conceded that the Cannes audience “didn’t get the movie”, and its American distribution rights remained in limbo for another four months.

The Shrouds is a deeply, deeply odd film. The story, as much as the film can be said to have a story, concerns an entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel), who operates a cemetery with a unique twist, an advanced technology known as “GraveTech.” The dead are buried in the eponymous shrouds, which capture real-time three-dimensional imagery of the corpses, which loved ones can watch at their leisure – whether on televisions embedded on the tombstone or their mobile devices.

Karsh is still recovering from the loss of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), who died from cancer. Karsh finds himself drawn into a series of sprawling and disconnected plots involving Becca’s twin sister Terry (also Kruger), Terry’s ex-husband and Karsh’s tech wizard Maury (Guy Pearce), and Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the blind wife of a potential investor. When his cemetery is disturbed in an act of vandalism, Karsh finds himself drawn into a possible web of espionage involving Russia and China.

It’s all very convoluted. It makes a great deal of sense in the context of The Shrouds as a potential prestige streaming miniseries, launching all of these plot threads into the air in the hope that they might resolve themselves over eight or ten episodes. However, in the context of the film as it exists, these are all messy and contradictory ideas that seem to pull Karsh in multiple different directions instead of providing a conventional and linear story arc.

It shouldn’t work, but it does, in large part because that disoriented and disconnected affect is a large part of what The Shrouds is about. The central thrust of the film is that Karsh is most definitely not okay and has certainly not recovered from the loss of his wife four years earlier. He is moving from one crisis to another, with no larger framework to support him. Of course the world doesn’t make sense, and of course all of these competing elements vying for his attention seem like noise.

Central to The Shrouds is Karsh’s obsession with Becca’s body. He cannot bear to be separated from it. On a blind date with Myrna Slotnik (Jennifer Dale), Karsh talks about the experience of Becca’s funeral, how he wanted to climb into the grave beside her. Karsh obsesses over the live feed from Becca’s grave, watching her body decay and erode over time. Karsh is haunted by her digital ghost, a live feed to what remains of the woman he loved.

The Shrouds is a deeply personal work for Cronenberg, inspired by the death of his wife Carolyn in 2017 after 43 years of marriage. As Karsh, Cassell is styled as a movie-star stand-in for Cronenberg himself, with an upswept crop of white hair, a preference for suits and sneakers. Although Cronenberg insists that Karsh is a fictional character, he does concede that “the impetus to do this film came from the loss of [his] wife and [his] reaction to that.”

The Shrouds is a very Cronenbergian study of grief, with its emphasis on the importance of the physical body as an emotional totem. “When the body dies, that person is gone,” Cronenberg has explained. “There's no person anymore. There's no spirit, there's no soul, nothing. Therefore, the body that's left is what's left, and if you have an attachment, if you're not ready to let go, then the body is important to you.” The body is real, tactile, tangible.

Throughout the film, Karsh is haunted by nightmares of his final weeks and months with Becca. He imagines her being called away for surgery, as parts of her body are chopped away in an effort to stop the spread of the cancer. Her breast is removed, then her arm. It’s a very graphic literalization of the emotional sensation of losing a person in real time, feeling somebody slip away piece by piece. “They’re chopping away at you,” he states.

Obviously, an individual is more than their body – they are a mind and a personality. However, the body is what makes the person tangible and tactile. The body is a point of connection. “I lived in Becca’s body,” Karsh admits at one point. “It was the only place I ever really lived. Her body… was the world. The meaning and purpose of the world.” The loss of her body – to the surgeons cutting away at it, to time eroding it – means the loss of not just Becca herself, but Karsh’s connection to Becca.

In many ways, the body exists to be perceived, for the benefit of another. At one point, Karsh dons one of the shrouds himself. “I wanted to know what it felt like to be wrapped, to be shrouded,” he explains. However, his virtual assistant Hunni (also voiced by Kreuger) explains that the technology does not exist for the benefit of the dead. “She didn’t feel it,” the artificial intelligence tells Karsh. “It’s not meant for the living.” The dead exist in the world largely through the prism of the living.

“You never considered cremation?” Myrna asks Karsh. Karsh replies that Becca was Jewish. The body is particularly important in the Jewish faith. Asked about his own religious beliefs, Karsh shrugs them off, explaining that he is “a non-observant atheist.” There is a sense of Cronenberg creeping in around the edge of the frame within that contradiction. Asked about the film, Cronenberg clarified, “I’m very Jewish, and I’m completely irreligious, and completely secular, and atheist.”

As befitting a filmmaker who holds a strong interest in Sigmund Freud, there is a recurring tension within Cronenberg’s work about his Jewish identity. Interestingly, he seems to have found some connection to that identity through his wife’s family, with whom he went “to seders and things like that because [he] never did that as a child.” In 2007, Cronenberg produced and starred in the short film, At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World.

Perhaps because the film is tied to the death of his wife, The Shrouds feels more overtly tied to Cronenberg’s Jewish heritage and identity. When the cemetery is defaced by vandals, it is hard not to think of the desecration of Jewish cemeteries in recent years. When Terry indulges in some COVID era paranoia about the doctors who treated Becca, Karsh can’t help but think of the antisemitism of “the doctors’ plot”, which he describes as “Stalin’s paranoid Jewish fantasy.”

The Shrouds is often about characters lost in their paranoia. Terry and Maury are both full-blown conspiracy theorists. A significant portion of the plot involves theorizing about the involvement of Chinese tech companies in Karsh’s start-up and whether this is a covert act of espionage, recalling similar concerns over Chinese ownership of TikTok. Terry is convinced that the doctors were experimenting on Becca, evoking the anti-vaxxer conspiracies that are gaining traction.

Karsh fixates on more personal paranoia, wondering if Becca was cheating on him with her doctor, Jerry Eckler (Steve Switzman), as an expression of his feelings about the loss of his connection to her. “He had her body before I did,” Karsh explains. “Then he had her body as she was dying, as her doctor.” Dreaming of her return after a mastectomy, he asks, “What did they do with your breast? Where is it?” Becca replies, “Dr. Eckler has it.” Karsh’s paranoia is just a way of literalizing his anxiety.

The Shrouds suggests that loss of physical connection also unravels an individual’s tether to reality. Karsh spends most of the movie interacting with Hunni, an artificial intelligence created by Maury. It’s interesting to wonder whether Maury modelled Hunni on his ex-wife Terry or on Karsh’s wife Becca. Either way, Hunni becomes a way for Maury to spy on and manipulate Karsh, who seems increasingly alienated from reality. She is a simulacra, a construct, a fantasy, an echo.

Even the image of the body that he streams from the grave is not the physical object itself. It is a digital construct, and so can be doctored and manipulated. Over the course of the film, Karsh becomes obsessed with what look like strange growths on Becca’s skeleton. Towards the end of the movie, Doctor Rory Zhao (Jeff Yung) studies the footage and argues that the image has actually been altered by Maury. Maybe what Karsh has been obsessively watching isn’t Becca.

Later, Maury lures Karsh to a meeting to warn him about that Chinese plot, implicating Zhao and so creating a motivation for Zhao to lie about Maury doctoring the feed. As evidence, Maury reveals that the Chinese chopped two of his fingers off. However, Terry later tells Karsh that Maury lost those fingers as a teenager, “in shop class.” However, Maury’s two fingers were plainly visible in footage that Terry played for Karsh a few scenes earlier, adding another wrinkle of uncertainty.

Karsh conceded that he may simply have never noticed that Maury was missing two fingers, and this provides him with the justification to argue that Maury’s story doesn’t add up. “The fingers is a Yakuza thing,” he rationalizes. “Japanese, not Chinese.” Throughout The Shrouds, it is impossible to tell what is real and what is not, and so characters often choose to believe – or even to see – what is most comforting to them.

This provides an interesting contemporary context for Cronenberg’s bodily preoccupation. The body is real. It exists in physical space, as a point of connection. However, the loss of that connection – whether through death in Karsh’s case or divorce in Maury’s – threatens to  unmoor the individual from reality, especially in this increasingly digital world. In this way, The Shrouds makes an interesting companion piece to Cronenberg’s turn of the millennium virtual reality thriller eXistenz.

In The Shrouds, Cronenberg grapples with perhaps the most fundamental body horror of all: the loss of it.