‘The Shrouds’ Review: Body Horror Master David Cronenberg Loses The Plot In A Tangle Of Conspiracy Theories – Cannes Film Festival
20.05.2024 - 23:33
/ deadline.com
When his wife died, Karsh tells the blind date he has asked to lunch, he had an overwhelming urge to jump into the coffin with her rather than see her sent away alone. Instead, he contrived a way to straddle the worlds of the living and the dead, setting up a luxury cemetery where the dead are wrapped in metallic shrouds that are like camera blankets. Above ground, there are screens over each grave on which you can watch your loved one disintegrating.
Welcome to Gravetech, the latest of Canadian director David Cronenberg’s sinister institutions, and welcome to The Shrouds, Cronenberg’s latest feature to debut in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
Over the four years since she died, the painfully bereaved Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has been checking in to see his wife Becca’s body – already crumbling with cancer before she passed – rot down to the bone. The grave next to hers is reserved for him. Karsh also owns the ritzy restaurant that overlooks the immaculate burial ground. Would this nice lady in the navy blazer like to join him in looking at his Becca’s mouldering skeleton? Is this possibly the worst date ever?
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Cronenberg is known as the doyen of body horror, but even the most gruesome of his films are a bad fit with the conventions and expectations of the horror genre. Rather, his films are rooted in his fascination with the body: with our pink interior flesh, with the way the body pulsates in life and deteriorates in death, with its afflictions, addictions, perversions and potential transformations.
Which is not to say he is not also intrigued by the outside world: how