Taking in a new David Cronenberg film occasionally evokes the strangeness of a beloved cat bringing a fresh kill to your door: It’s somehow unsettling and affecting, a horror yet a gift, and decidedly weird but also sad and even funny.
The subjects of grief and biotechnology in the macabre Canadian’s latest offering, “The Shrouds,” are also known to call up a host of conflicting feelings. Is it any wonder, then, that in the hands of a fearlessly surgical provocateur with bereavement on his mind after the death of his wife of 43 years, these interlinked topics have sparked another cool, cunning, disquieting work about our ceaseless fascination with what the body betrays? If this ends up being Cronenberg’s last, he’ll have gone out with a worldly, weighty epitaph.
As beginnings go, the filmmaker offers up a hilarious theme-setting blind date that even a premier satirist like George Saunders would envy. “How dark are you willing to go?” widowed entrepreneur Karsh (a weary, distinguished Vincent Cassel) asks his elegant also-widowed companion (Jennifer Dale) when she expresses curiosity about his work. (As if eating in a restaurant at a place he owns called Gravetech isn’t the first clue about his headspace.)
With clinical enthusiasm, Karsh shows her his multimillion-dollar coping mechanism: a tastefully manicured cemetery of human-height tombstones with screens that allow deep-pocket mourners, via a specially encrypted app, to watch in real time, and from any angle, the decaying corpse of their buried loved ones. Karsh cues up his wife, Becca, for viewing (surveilling?) and the look on his date’s face says it all: worst dinner-and-a-movie ever.
Karsh’s obsession — with his wife’s decomposition and growing his business — is real, so much so that when he notices unusual nodes inside Becca’s zoomed-in skull and his cemetery is vandalized in what feels like a targeted act, he wants answers. Becca’s surviving twin sister, Terry (a dual-role Diane Kruger), a committed skeptic, suspects the nodes are tracking devices and that Becca’s experimental cancer treatment wasn’t on the up and up.
Hashing things out with his tech wizard brother-in-law Maury (a shaggy Guy Pearce), Karsh wonders if ecological protesters or religious groups or competitors are upset with his global expansion plans, which include a lava field in Iceland. Meanwhile, a rich, dying Hungarian investor’s blind, sexy wife (Sandrine Holt), whom Karsh starts an affair with, hints that the Russians or the Chinese might see potential in hacking Gravetech’s network of grievers. Ashes to ashes, data to data?
Leave it to our preeminent corporeal-fusion fantasist (“The Fly,” “Videodrome,” “Crash,” “eXistenZ”) to envision a near-future 21st-century vision of techno-intrigue that, in conjunction with lifestyle enhancements we already have — biotech devices, Karsh’s self-driving car and AI avatar assistant — feels closer to reality than Cronenberg’s ever imagined before. So much of what he’s explored on screen has come true: Everything is a creative convenience, a threat and a turn-on. And there, like an old friend, is Cronenberg’s regular composer Howard Shore with a synth moan to keep the mood unnerving.
“The Shrouds” may sound like a thriller (death, theft, espionage) but its sleek, icy allure is in presenting Karsh as a pawn to the rabbit hole of his grief, which plays out across the film in speculative, increasingly intimate conversations and erotic detours, including a ghostly replaying of nude bedroom scenes with the cancer-ridden Becca. We’re always reminded that the body is a temple, a vessel. But leave it to Cronenberg to also note that in our darkest moments, the body most often feels like a conspiracy.
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