In David Cronenberg’s newest film, “The Shrouds,” a widower named Karsh Relikh, played by Vincent Cassell, takes a woman on a blind date to his dead wife’s grave. They stop in front of her tombstone — a double plot, with empty space for Karsh to occupy in the future — and pay their respects in a very Cronenbergian way. On a screen on the headstone is a real-time image of his wife’s body, decaying in its grave, captured by the high-tech metallic “shroud” she was buried in; it is also transmitted to a smartphone app that allows Karsh to zoom and rotate the image at will. This technology allows people to remain connected to their loved ones by watching their bodies disintegrate, like a mash-up of the Buddhist corpse meditation and a mindfulness app. “I can see what’s happening to her,” Karsh says, enraptured, as his date squirms in discomfort. “I’m in the grave with her. I’m involved with her body the way I was in life, only even more.”
You know what you are about to be shown: a body in some state of decay. But as the screen traces the desiccated shape of Karsh’s wife, Becca, with tender slowness, the effect is still irrationally startling. Death has rendered Becca’s elegant features down to an anonymized skull. Even so, there is someone on the screen whom Karsh recognizes and responds to at the deepest emotional level. You feel disgust, of course, but also a secondhand intimacy. What’s shocking is not the rotting body but the affection with which it is viewed, a tenderness that allows you to continue looking. You are not encountering death in the abstract, impersonal and horrific: You are seeing it anew, through the devoted gaze of the lover who has been left behind.
These days there is nothing so shocking about seeing gruesome things on film. Horror movies are now mainstream, and it’s common for at least a few of the biggest releases at any given megaplex to offer some kind of grisly fright. Violence is also more common than ever on the screens of our laptops and phones, where social media catalogs accidents, bombings and dead children with eerie nonchalance. Despite all this, Cronenberg’s films remain difficult to digest. They are full of disconcerting bodily transgressions, rooted in aberrant desire. They get under the skin, repulsing even viewers accustomed to the usual Hollywood blood and gore. His last film, “Crimes of the Future,” from 2022, prompted one dissatisfied reviewer to write that it “should be renamed crimes against humanity.”
Perhaps this is because of the way Cronenberg’s movies tend to relish the things that are most terrifying to the audience. Other horror films share the viewer’s repugnance, even reinforce it; only Cronenberg asks you to imagine what it would be like to be erotically transfixed by a car crash (as in “Crash”) or by tenderly performing ornamental surgeries on your partner (as in “Crimes of the Future”). His films invite you into a morality that does not yet exist, hinting at the possibility that the values and norms of your world could be supplanted someday. In a recent interview, he pointed out that we already possess the technical know-how to make something like his fictional death shrouds: “It’s an imagined technology probably nobody really wants, but I’m saying: What if somebody did want it?” Rather than dwelling in the horror of transgression, his interest is in what lies beyond — in transgression’s intimate life.
Lately it feels as if movies are more Cronenbergian than ever, obsessed with triggering our fear of the body’s capacity for gruesome transformation. “The Substance,” a hit from the French director Coralie Fargeat, served up the story of an aging actress who creates a younger, sexier double of herself to stay on top of her body-obsessed industry — but suffers a rapid and freakish decrepitude when the double decides to go rogue. “Mickey 17,” a science-fiction romp from the Oscar winner Bong Joon Ho, follows a high-risk worker who is used as an experimental guinea pig, then cloned and tossed ruthlessly down a recycling chute. In each, we see bodies agonizing under the burden of a monstrous social system.
‘It’s an imagined technology probably nobody really wants, but I’m saying: What if somebody did want it?’
But each, arguably, approaches its material from a conventional moral standpoint. Fargeat’s story just exaggerates our misogynistic fear of aging into a full-blown spectacle, where viewers squirm at the idea of a monstrously aged and disfigured Demi Moore realizing that her index finger has become the wizened necrotic digit of a crone. What’s missing in the film — which Fargeat herself says was influenced by Cronenberg’s “The Fly” — is the invitation to feel differently about the impasses of body image and aging. The story simply performs “fear fulfillment”: the affirmation of dread we already hold inside us about aging, loss and rejection. No matter how bad you think growing old is going to be, “The Substance” seems to say, it’ll actually be worse.
“The Shrouds” is just the most recent in a late-in-life sequence of Cronenberg movies that do the opposite: Instead of terrifying you by showing you something you are already terrified of, these stories reveal squeamish new possibilities. Cronenberg films used to look into the future; “Videodrome,” from 1983, even coined a phrase, “Long live the new flesh,” that has lived on as a celebration of biological matter extended and mutated by its entanglement with technology. (Never fear, those stories seemed to say: Once the future has made you into something unrecognizably alien, it won’t feel alien anymore. It’ll feel like home.) But in this recent work, the 82-year-old Cronenberg seems more interested in looking back at mortality, a problem that no technology has been able to solve. He shows that once-new flesh aging, breaking down, sinking into disability.
He also shows its vulnerabilities opening up new avenues for emotional connection. Karsh Relikh finds a sort of renewal in his romance with a blind woman, who places her hands directly on his face to learn about him, inviting him back into a world of touch. In “Crimes of the Future,” the widespread loss of the sensation of pain leads to a culture of erotic surgery, in which lovers explore and reshape one another’s bodies. In contrast with the bodily regimes of Fargeat and Bong — and horror directors like Julia Ducorneau and Cronenberg’s own son, Brandon — Cronenberg’s is an almost optimistic vision. It’s just an extremely unusual one.
When we think about aging, we think about the abjection of the flesh, its inevitable disintegration, the rigidity of its path through the world. The most striking thing in “The Shrouds” is how this vulnerability is refigured as an enticing point of potential. The losses that Karsh’s wife suffers in her long battle with a rare cancer — an amputated arm and a mastectomy — are recast as eerie and unnerving, but also startlingly erotic. They make her body more unmistakably her own. The horror comes instead in the form of Karsh’s virtual assistant, an A.I. avatar who happens to have Becca’s voice and appearance: It begins to lash out, mimicking Becca’s disfigurements and gyrating lasciviously. Becca’s disintegration emphasizes the parts of her that endure; the avatar, on the other hand, is a parody of that real flesh, an uncanny and malevolent imitation.
It is the versions of Becca that won’t decay — the digital copy, the nightmares Karsh has of her painful last days — that are monstrous, nothing like the woman he longs for. The real version, the one that lingers on in the shroud, is at peace. Unlike the screen, which mummifies an image, the shroud allows for the passage of time, the ability to change, the heightened meaning that mortality gives to what we do while we still live. “I lived in Becca’s body,” Karsh tells Becca’s identical twin sister, as he struggles to explain his grief in living on after her. “It was the only place I really lived.” Death is sublime and terrifying, life-ending and life-giving. What it’s not, as Cronenberg has told us throughout his long and strange career, is the end.
Alexandra Kleeman is the author, most recently, of the novel “Something New Under the Sun.”
Source photographs for illustration above: From Sideshow and Janus Films; H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock, via Getty Images.
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