The auteur's latest film in competition at Cannes is about a widowed entrepreneur who invents a device that allows him to monitor his deceased wife.
Vincent Cassel plays a recently widowed tech mogul who invents a fabric device with a camera, sensor, and still image camera that allows mourners to observe their loved ones decomposing in the grave in David Cronenberg's final film, The Shrouds. Viewers don't even need to have read or heard the director explain how the film is partly inspired by his own grief for his deceased wife, because that authentic essence is palpable throughout. Sadly, in a reversal of the natural order of gem-making, that pearl of emotional truth ends up embedded in the rawness and muck of a less imaginative than usual narrative, tired (for Cronenberg) ideas, and bland performances. None of this will enhance the director's reputation at this stage of his career.
Director: David Cronenberg
Writer: David Cronenberg
Stars: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce
Dressed mostly in impeccably tailored black clothes, Karsh (Cassell) is a French-speaking entrepreneur who has lived in Toronto for years. (Saint Laurent designer Anthony Vaccarello takes credit for the design of the clothes, as well as for the producer, which might explain why it sometimes feels like a bizarre exercise in product placement.) Karsh's late wife, Becca (played by Diane Kruger in flashbacks and dream sequences), died about a year ago of cancer after surgery that removed a breast and half of an arm.
Because Becca was Jewish and therefore preferred to be buried rather than traditionally cremated, Karsh had her corpse wrapped in one of his tech company's newest products: a shroud made of electronic mesh and sensors that composes a detailed visual map of the body. After the burial, the living can approach the grave, log into a security app, and see how much flesh has decomposed on a screen built into the headstone. This idea may seem completely ridiculous to you, but they say that everyone grieves differently.
Karsh's business also owns the Toronto cemetery where Becca is buried, which, unlike most cemeteries, features an elegant restaurant in its main building, resembling a typical upscale café attached to a museum. It's there that Karsh meets the elegant Gray Foner (Elizabeth Saunders) for a first date in the opening scene, which, judging by Gray's expression of bewilderment and barely suppressed horror, doesn't seem to be going well. But the real purpose of the interaction is to add too much explanation to the dialogue.
From this premise, the film begins to weave a faint air of mystery when someone knocks over some graves in the middle of the night, and Karsh begins to investigate. Could the damage have been caused by pesky environmentalists opposed to burying such potentially toxic materials in Mother Earth? Or does the evidence that some of the lines connecting the shrouds to the tombstone screens were tapped suggest industrial espionage is underway, particularly by obscure Chinese interests?
Karsh brings in his ex-brother-in-law Maury (Guy Pearce), a cyber genius who installed Karsh's security systems, as well as an online digital assistant named Hunny (whose animated avatar bears a striking resemblance to Becca) to help him investigate. But can the jittery Maury be trusted?
Certainly, if Maury were the film's protagonist, viewers would yell at him not to trust Karsh, who, midway through the film, starts sleeping with Maury's ex-wife, Terry (also Kruger, of course), Becca's twin sister, for whom Maury still has feelings. A washed-up dog groomer who favors Birkenstocks and overalls—and probably not the ones designed by Saint Laurent—Terry is meant to be seen as Becca's polar opposite, personality-wise. But she's cool enough not to mind too much when Karsh makes it clear he wants her body, partly out of a perverse desire to break the taboo against sleeping with his partner's brothers and partly because he misses Becca's body, which is exactly like Terry's, at least genetically.
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