SCRENE
Cronenberg is back to his best; Wes Anderson plays it straight; Brit-lit adapted; Japanese AI school drama; and more
THE SHROUDS From The Brood through Scanners, Videodrome and Crash, David Cronenberg made his name as the visceral laureate of late capitalism, with lurid visions of humanity transformed by technology, fear and desire. The body heat of his films has cooled in recent years to a chilly elegance, as in 2022’s Crimes Of The Future, but his morbid fascination with the new flesh has never dimmed.
The Shrouds feels like his most autobiographical film yet. Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, a tech entrepreneur with a familiar white shock of hair, who, like Cronenberg, has lost his wife to cancer. The loss gnaws at him and he’s haunted by nightmares of his wife returning to his bed, each time with a new breast, limb, bone or vital organ lost to the disease. He’s intimately spooked by her presence in other ways: his wife’s identical twin sister, Terry, a woman who is erotically charged by conspiracies, and his AI digital assistant Hunny, who simulates his wife’s voice, even when transformed into an anime koala bear.
Karsh puts his grief to work, devising macabre hi-tech body shrouds to be wrapped around the deceased in the grave, allowing mourners to remain intimate with their loved ones, via a connected phone app offering 4k stills of their slow decay. The technology proves surprisingly popular, with bids to create surveillance cemeteries around the world, until one day several graves, including his wife’s, are mysteriously desecrated and hacked, with the apps no longer receiving data. It’s a second, savage loss for Karsh, and things start to become seriously strange.