Exquisite Corpse
By Eileen G’Sell
The Shrouds
Dir. David Cronenberg, Canada, Sideshow/Janus Films
More than any other culture, Americans are compulsively death-denying. We dub our final chapter our “Golden Years,” even though this period is often rife with medical bills, dementia, and banal bodily pain. We embalm our dead at higher rates than any other country, preserving an illusion of haleness for public display. We trade cloying euphemisms about the afterlife, regardless of spiritual belief: “he’s in a better place” for a human loved one, or, for our animal companions, “she’s crossed the rainbow bridge,” as though our dogs and cats are waltzing down some eschatological yellow brick road.
For those weary of the rhetoric (and industry) of death sentimentality, David Cronenberg’s latest foray into existential body horror, The Shrouds, would seem a fitting tonic. After all, who could be more qualified to honor the grisly reality of physical decline and decomposition as something both philosophically and emotionally provocative? “Cronenberg must resort to drastic tactics if he is to remind his audience to want what the civilized world is bent on neutering,” argues Becca Rothfeld in an essay on the erotic pull of the director’s oeuvre. This is the same guy who, in Crimes of the Future (2022), conflated sex with surgery; who in The Fly (1986) depicts Jeff Goldblum getting hotter and hornier not long before his fingernails peel off.
Carrying on with the tradition of mingling eros with the abject, The Shrouds reimagines how we might visually regard our faithful departed. Its premise: a Toronto entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) devises a state-of-the-art burial cloth after the untimely death of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger). When digitally activated, the cloth records the ongoing decomposition of the “shrouded” loved one—accessible from a smartphone or projected onto an LCD screen on the headstone itself. Dubbed “GraveTech,” Karsh’s invention catches on not only in his tony Ontario quarters but around the world. He’s not the only one, it seems, for whom mourning flirts with subdued necrophilia.
“Grief is rotting your teeth,” a dentist informs Karsh, when he awakes from a dream of his wife’s body, a glowing insect buzzing over her grey eyelids. It is actually Becca who is rotting—whose body was, evidently, so ravishing to Karsh that any confirmation of her corporeal existence continues to comfort him. Much of the initial appeal of this movie come from its normalization of this conceit. As ever, Cronenberg couldn’t care less if we find creepy what he finds earnestly soul-searching. A glassy, sunlit restaurant overlooks the GraveTech cemetery; few seem queasy about the prospect of munching lunch a stone’s throw from Mortality Central. Terry, Karsh’s poofy-haired sister-in-law (also played by Kruger), is more alarmed by conspiracy theories than his extreme obsession with Becca’s physical form. “I lived in Becca’s body,” he confesses to Terry, choking up. “It was the only place I really lived. Her body was the world, the meaning and the purpose of the world. I don’t think I can really explain it.”
However unnerving it is to hear a man mistake his wife’s body with his own, the invitation to partake in Karsh’s intense woe—and voyeurism—plays on what Cronenberg arguably does best: probe the extremes of human frailty from an intellectually curious standpoint. But where, in previous films like The Fly, we are asked to sympathize with a protagonist’s terror at his own body, experiencing his horror as our own, in The Shrouds we are meant to sympathize with a middle-aged man lamenting the horror of his wife’s cancer-ridden, then death-ravaged, body: her experience of physical and psychological horror is never the point.
Had the film continued to explore Karsh’s pathological need to control Becca’s body, even after her passing, we might have had the chance to ponder the ways in which the binds of marriage are hardly “till death do us part.” Instead, The Shrouds sputters off into a series of plot twists, each more preposterous than the last. Karsh spies a scattering of tiny nodules growing from Becca’s skeleton. Are they signs that her corpse has been contaminated? Has someone hacked into GraveTech? When the flagship cemetery is ransacked and its digital network shut down, Karsh pairs up with Terry’s ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce), a disheveled tech whiz who boasts digital know-how. At this point the movie veers into whodunit territory, though it hasn’t given us a compelling reason to be alarmed about what precisely was done to Becca’s already unrecognizable corpse, let alone who did it. Meanwhile, Cronenberg focuses on Karsh’s lurid carnal flashbacks of his wife, yet we never gain any sense of her subjectivity; both in dialogue and in affect, she’s a total cipher. When she appears onscreen, she is nude, seductive, and strangely detached from the gruesome amputations of her body. “I can’t balance, but I’ll be okay,” she explains as she enters their bedroom newly mutilated. “We can still have sex,” she offers to Karsh, even when that means (literally) breaking yet another body part.
Here, as elsewhere, his disquiet about Becca’s body, dead or alive, is what the movie centers. The only thing we learn about her—beyond the fact that one breast is bigger than the other—is that she once had an affair with a former mentor (of whom Karsh, unsurprisingly, remains viciously jealous). The physical anguish of Becca losing her life—and limb! and breast!—to cancer is explored only as it affects her possessive husband. Anyone who has suffered a mastectomy, or loved someone who has, might be reasonably insulted here. Much of this strand of the movie would be offensive if what narratively surrounds it weren’t so histrionic. By the time Maury and Karsh swap theories of whether GraveTech was vandalized by the Chinese or the Russians, The Shrouds begins to feel like a shlocky Cold War-era spy thriller.
When Karsh embarks on an affair with Soo-Min (Sandrine Hohlt), the stylish Korean Canadian wife of a dying GraveTech investor, her body slowly becomes his new “meaning and purpose.” The fact that she is blind conveniently serves his enduring need for control; just as Becca cannot look back at her graveside voyeur, Soo-Min lacks the ability to fully return Karsh’s increasingly lusty gaze. In a way, the film’s penchant for Asian exoticism complements its latent misogyny. The traditional Japanese interior of Karsh’s penthouse, complete with live koi flickering in a pond below his bed, seems to suggest an aestheticism that somehow explains his fixation with Becca’s beautiful body. Or maybe his Kanso-inflected digs are meant to suggest that Karsh is on a spiritual journey aligned with that of the director, who lost his second wife in 2017 and based The Shrouds at least in part on his mourning process. Affecting as that may be, the film’s ponderous objectification of its female characters strikes a different chord than his later movies, in which the hyperbolized context tends to call attention to the act. By contrast, women die of cancer all the time; so, too, do they rely on service dogs to guide them in public.
For fans of Cronenberg who admire his willingness to boldly explore our mortality and physical precarity, The Shrouds should, at the very least, lend some intellectual fodder to the very human tendency to sentimentalize our dead. What otherwise remains is more shallow than grave—a reminder that even Cronenberg can overlook what makes the best of body horror emotionally eviscerating.