One day on the set of The Shrouds, Vincent Cassel fell asleep on a couch while waiting for cameras to start rolling. He was approached in a kind of haze by someone who’d just realized how much he had come to resemble the film’s iconic 81-year-old director, David Cronenberg. “My voice coach said to me, ‘It’s really strange. You were sleeping, and I thought it was David—but David was next to me,’” the actor recalls. “Two days later, I entered my trailer between shots and I crossed my reflection—and I saw David.” Then his costar Diane Kruger told Cassel she kept seeing him and Cronenberg as son and father.
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That night, Cassel decided to call Cronenberg and address the elephant in the room. It wasn’t until this moment that they’d acknowledged Cassel’s character was essentially a fictionalized version of the director. “That night I said, ‘David, it’s freaky,’ and I told him all these little things that had happened. He said, ‘Vincent, I’m watching the dailies—and I see myself.’”
Cronenberg’s wife and partner of 43 years, the film editor Carolyn Cronenberg, died of an undisclosed illness in 2017. The grieving director subsequently devised The Shrouds (premiering Monday at the Cannes Film Festival 2024), a portrait of a man coming to terms with the loss of his life partner. Cassel’s Cronenberg stand-in is a businessman named Karsh, who owns a restaurant in a cemetery and has just invented a controversial device that broadcasts footage from burial shrouds—in other words, a live feed of a decaying corpse. From there, the story takes on something of a spy-thriller hue, with Karsh racing to uncover the source of a hack with the help of his sister-in-law (Kruger) and her ex-husband (Guy Pearce), while courting a potential new love interest (Sandrine Holt).
Through the high-tech premise, we observe Karsh contending with his own elongated mourning. Cronenberg tells me this is where the memoir aspect of The Shrouds ends. “There’s something obviously personal in anything that you write, because your understanding of the human condition is your life,” he says. “But then it takes on its own life.”
His actors were not so sure. “David is not somebody who really shares intimate stuff like this,” Cassel says. “The most intimate things I’ve learned were really through the script.” In his most prominent English-language role to date, the César-winning actor—who previously collaborated with Cronenberg in 2007’s Eastern Promises and 2011’s A Dangerous Method—cannily plays with the murky distance between memoir and fiction. Cronenberg concedes he noticed how closely Cassel was observing him. “Just the way he moved and so on, I knew that he was studying me,” Cronenberg says. “I thought that was fine. I mean, why not? It’s a good model, even though I am not as much of an entrepreneur as Karsh is. Although we both do drive Teslas.”
Kruger plays several roles in The Shrouds. In addition to Karsh’s sister-in-law, she’s both his AI assistant and his late wife, Becca, via flashbacks. Cronenberg found himself floored by her deft understanding of all three characters, and the way she subtly connected them. Kruger, meanwhile, thought the film seemed unusually emotional for a project by the director of such genre fare as Scanners and Crimes of the Future.
“He proceeded to tell me that it was based on very intimate and private things, which was a bit of a shock to me, to be honest,” she tells me. “The magnitude of having to play his deceased wife and her sister—it all kind of came crashing down on me.”
Kruger, who won Cannes’s 2017 best-actress prize for In the Fade, ranges from heartbreaking to dryly funny in the film. But she easily felt most exposed playing the deceased Becca. Those flashback scenes were predominantly nude and romantic, an examination of the physical closeness Karsh continues to heavily grieve. As they progress, we see her body increasingly covered with scars, indicating the progression of an illness. “[Some of those] precise moments actually happened, and I don’t know, I felt almost like an intruder sometimes,” Kruger says. “[David] is reliving. And he did hide a little bit, I felt, in those scenes. He directed us, but he was in a director’s tent.”
The demands of the role pushed Kruger well outside of her comfort zone. “I never do a lot of nudity in movies,” she says, “and that aspect to me was not easy. It’s not that I’m a prude, but it makes you feel very, very, very, very vulnerable in another sense of just being naked emotionally.” There are also nude images in the film of Karsh and Becca; they were taken by photographer Caitlin Cronenberg, the director’s daughter. “That was a real mind fuck for me because, in a way, she’s taking nude photos of her mother, right?” Kruger says. “The whole thing was just bizarre. I guess I was a little coy in those pictures…. But that’s what this movie is about, loving a body as much as the mind of somebody. So I mean, I totally get it.”
Making the movie proved an exercise in subverting expectations. Cassel was struck especially by the final scene—“I’ve never seen an ending like this”—and the dark humor coursing through the drama. For Kruger, the challenge was navigating a profoundly personal piece as if it were any other film. “David comes across as detached from the story, and yet he’s not, because he wrote this,” she says. “I felt completely naked and in this twilight zone of feeling my director reliving something that was very, very traumatic for him.” She later emphasizes the impact of the experience on her: “I feel really proud that he chose me to play those parts. Not for nothing, I’m a huge Cronenberg fan.”
Cronenberg may not believe The Shrouds to be as thoroughly autobiographical as it may appear. But a personal reading appears inevitable among audiences familiar with his work and life. It’s a quieter film from the director—still forthright in its focus on the body, but a bit softer and more cerebral. Kruger wants to see that stylistic shift embraced. “I hope that people will be tender with his story,” she says. “That’s what I wish for.”
The Shrouds premieres Monday, May 20. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive Cannes Film Festival 2024 coverage, featuring first looks and in-depth features on some of the festival’s most exciting debuts.
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