Cannes 2024: David Cronenberg’s ‘The Shrouds’ Fails to Impress | Review

MOVIE REVIEWS

Cannes 2024

The Shrouds

by Federico Pontiggia

Do they kill shrouds like this too? Not to mention the masters. At eighty-one, David Cronenberg takes us to the cemetery, aided by his protagonist’s brilliant idea. Vincent Cassel’s Karsh, styled à la Cronenberg, is an inconsolable widower who invents GraveTech, a futuristic and controversial device for monitoring the deceased in their shrouds. Yes, you read that right: observing the decomposition of the dead. Okay, the world is strange, but can you see a demand for such an offer? Exactly, it requires a lot of suspension of disbelief.

Anyway, in competition at Cannes 77, two years after the pale Crimes of the Future, The Shrouds is full of clear signals of what Cronenberg was and perhaps no longer is: from the cemetery (of elephants) to its desecration, which prompts Karsh to investigate, alongside – in dreams – his ex-wife, sister-in-law (both played by Diane Kruger), a techie (Guy Pearce), an exotic beauty (Sandrine Holt), and the artificial intelligence assisting his avatar.

The film is part couple’s game, part De profundis, with a sprinkling of body horror and a lot of wandering, tangling the thin plot with post-mortem fantasies and conspiracy theories, Chinese expansionism and Russian hackers, family couplings and, in writing, artificial intelligence.

It’s touching, but also regretful, to see how one can stick to a bad idea and not let it go despite the undeniable truth that it doesn’t work. Cronenberg is his own champion, and also his own imitator: where there was once a Christ of the Seventh Art, there is now a shroud – the joke about the Shroud of Turin is actually diegetic.

Cassel, deeply involved, tries until the end to muster some interest, as does Kruger in her own way, but what is dead is dead, and it would be better to let it rest in peace.

Cinematografo, May 21, 2024