"And mother, when the big tears fall,
(And fall, God knows, they may)
Tell him I died of my great love
And my dying heart was gay.
And mother dear, when the sun has set
And the pale kirk grass waves,
Then carry me through the dim twilight
And hide me among the graves."
--Elizabeth Siddal Rossetti, "At Last"
"Worms-meat, n. The final product of which we are the raw material."
--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary.
David Cronenberg is 82 years old at this writing and there's no telling if he'll ever make another film. The Shrouds (2025) is as good a valediction as anything. It is a more deeply personal film for the director than anything he's made since The Brood. It's a film that's drenched in an awareness of impending death. His death. His family's death. Everyone's death. As the title suggests, this film is a memento mori, more so than any other film the director has ever made. Cronenberg has always been curious about the mechanisms of life and evolution. In this film, he turns that curiosity on death, as both a physical process--a state of being in the world--and as a psychic phenomenon in which the connections between people, particularly lovers, are severed by the Grim Reaper's scythe.
The film follows Karsh Relikh, a man whose response to grief at the death of his wife is to found a technology company that allows a mourner to watch their loved ones as they decompose in the grave. The Gravetech cemetery mounts high definition monitors on the gravestones and provides access to the images created by custom shrouds that are laced through with sensors if the mourner has a correct passkey. Karsh is not just the creator of this tech, he is a user. His late wife, Becca, is interred in one of Karsh's shrouds. When we first meet Karsh, he's on a date--stepping back out into the world after his period of mourning. The new couple has dinner at the restaurant that Karsh built at the center of his cemetery, and after he asks, as a warning, how dark she wants to go in getting to know him, he takes her to Becca's grave and shows off the service. She is not on board with his program. Karsh's business is apparently successful. He's putting in Gravetech cemeteries in cities across the globe. His newest location is in Budapest. The representative of the investors is Soo-min Szabo, whose billionaire husband is terminally ill. Her interest in Karsh is personal as well as financial. Meanwhile, the shroud around Becca experiences a glitch. The image shows new growths on her bones, which shouldn't be possible. She's dead, after all, and growth is the last thing a dead body should be experiencing. Karsh interrogates Terry, Becca's sister, about the nature of the treatment Becca received in her last extremity, and discovers that there were irregularities with the oncologist, the elusive Dr. Jerry Eckler. Shortly afterward, the Gravetech cemetery is vandalized, including the grave of Karsh's wife. All of the gravestones targeted by the vandals were patients of Dr. Eckler. When he consults with his ex-partner (and Terry's ex-husband) Maury, who designed most of the tech involved with Karsh's shrouds and Karsh's AI girl Friday, Hunny. He discovers that the vandals have locked them out of the data feeds--they've "encrypted" the information in more ways than one. Maury is paranoid. He thinks the shroud technology has uses for intelligence agencies and is convinced that the vandals are working for a foreign power. Through all of this, Karsh is having visions of Becca returning to him during her illness, when the cancer had taken her breast and her forearm. His paranoia is pricked when Soo-min tells him that his AI is untrustworthy. And what exactly happened to Dr. Jerry Eckler anyway? He flew off to Iceland at some point and was never seen again...
The Shrouds has a plot that doesn't entirely cohere. The body horror element, the paranoia thriller, the recovery from grief element? None of them really fit together snugly. There are gaps in the narrative, possibly owing to the film's provenance as a series the director was developing for Netflix before they pulled the plug. All of these elements are so in keeping with Cronenberg's usual preoccupations that I wonder what he had in mind for the full series. None of this probably matters, because the underlying motivations of the film are strong enough to bully their way through the tyranny of a coherent plot. What's important is confronting the physical and psychic realities of death. How does one deal with the deterioration of the body of a loved one, both in life and in death? How does one deal with the connection a loving couple feels when it is severed? One of the film's key images finds Karsh laying in bed with his wife after she has lost her breast and her arm, then having sex during which he breaks her pelvis. This may seem a grotesque image, but unless one is entirely alone in the world I can guarantee that such a like situation will be visited upon you and I. Hell, I remember holding my mom to keep her warm after chemotherapy and a double mastectomy had ravaged her body, rendering it emaciated and prematurely old. I was only 21 at the time and my mom was only 51, so this is not a hypothetical that's relevant only to the old. I'm reminded of funerals in other lands where the mourners tear their shirts and climb on top of the coffin as it is lowered into the grave. Not that Cronenberg is the type of mourner to do such things even if this film suggests that he knows the psychology behind it.
The technology created by Narsh isn't unprecedented in the real world, either. It reminds me of Victorian and Gothic attitudes toward death. I've chosen the poem at the head of this post with a pointed intent. Elizabeth Siddal died young (as people did in Victorian England) and her husband, the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, buried her with a book of poems composed specifically upon her death with no intent for publication. Years later, Rossetti dug her up and published the book because he needed the money. Another literary echo of Gravetech is the scene in Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff opens Cathy's grave intending to lie beside her. More widespread and mundane was the practice of photographing the corpses of the recently departed--often of children--and keeping them on the mantle piece or hanging on the wall as a reminder of the deceased, perhaps the only memento of their existence. The Shrouds, for all its modernism, is very much along these lines.
While all of this is a generalized and maybe a universal experience, the film itself is not so conceived. The director has been up front about the fact that this film is his way of working through his own grief over the death of his wife of 43 years. Vincent Cassel (in his third film for the director) has been styled to resemble Cronenberg, making Karsh an overt avatar of the director. Another character, the elusive Dr. Eckler, is also styled to resemble Cronenberg, and by proxy, Karsh, and when we eventually catch up to him, he is dead and buried. If Viggo Mortensen's Saul Tenser in Crimes of the Future is Cronenberg bitching about aging, then this is him reckoning with the short time he has left. The conspiracy in the film has a perpetrator, but the film really doesn't care about that because the real perpetrator behind everything is our own treacherous biology that leads us into decay and ruin. Cronenberg, for the first time, seems bitter about the imperatives of biology. Biology has taken something from him. This film is his specific list of grievances. (The roots of the word grievance and grief are the same, by the way). Cronenberg is too cool and clinical a director to stand amid the tempest and rage like King Lear at the unfairness of the world; he instead seems resigned and philosophical.
Cronenberg's private universe is so distinctive that longtime viewers will look at the film and will feel the director guiding the experience. The film is haunted by Karsh's late wife, and the visions it provides of her are similar to the visions in the director's other films. The film it reminds me of most is Maps to the Stars, which drops hallucinations into the narrative without much warning with the frisson that often accompanies ghost stories. He does that here, too, particularly at the film's end which might be the gaudiest visions found in the entirety of his portfolio. Cronenberg doesn't believe in the supernatural, but the ghost in this film is just as terrifying for being a product of Karsh's mind. Like the doctor in The Body Snatcher who will never be rid of the sinister cab man even from beyond the grave ("you'll never be rid of me, never be rid of me, never be rid of me"), Karsh's last views of his wife are so indelible and fixed in his grief that he will carry them to any new lover he may meet. It's true of his AI assistant, of his wife's sister, of his new business partner. This is similar to the way Spider eventually saw all women wearing his mother's face at the end of Spider. The psychic shock has left scars that will never leave.
Time has taken a toll on Cronenberg's usual collaborators, so the film seems slightly off model some of the time. Well...maybe not "off model" so much as evolving into a new model. The evolutionary imperative will not be denied. Cronenberg is still loyal to his longtime collaborators, the most important of whom remain production designer Carol Spier and composer Howard Shore. Shore's contributions are so entwined with what a Cronenber film feels like that it makes me wonder what a contemporary film by the director might feel like if scored by someone else. The last film Cronenberg made that wasn't scored by Shore was The Dead Zone and even that film sounded like it was scored by Shore. Carol Spier has become so adept at conjuring modernist dystopias that she no longer needs the biological elements of Cronenberg's stories to generate creeps. The gravestones with the glowing screens on them is both of this moment and of eternity and deeply unsettling. Cronenberg's newer collaborators definitely exert an influence, though. This is the second Cronenberg film shot by Douglas Koch, and his contribution suggests that this is a third or fourth phase of the director's career because there are strong visual differences between the films shot by Mark Irwin, Peter Suschitzsky, and Koch. The director has worked with Vincent Cassel twice before, though the part of Karsh was originally offered to Viggo Mortensen. All of the other major actors are new to Cronenberg, though Becca/Terry/Hunny was to have been played by Léa Seydoux, who bowed out. Diane Kruger is splendid in the part, and her performance calls to mind the way Jeremy Irons differentiated the Mantle twins in Dead Ringers.
This is not a young person's film. It is sometimes theatrical and makes me wonder if it could work as a stage play. It does not provide shocks or mini-climaxes where the reel changes used to be. Karsh's visions are shocks of a different sort, not designed for genre, per se, but to illustrate the director's ideas about death and dying. In some ways, this reminds me of the work of other aging artists. In particular, I'm reminded of late Luis Buñuel whose last films were a then-unprecedented creative flowering, and of the late paintings by abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning. De Kooning's late paintings were made during the onset of Alzheimer's disease and critics have suggested that the biology of Alzheimer's forced the painter to unlearn a lifetime of tics and habits. They are thought to be among the painter's strongest works. I think Cronenberg would probably appreciate this if he knew the story. Late works by grouchy artists can seem dour or bitter at times. While Cronenberg's work has never been overtly funny, there are jokes if you know where to look. This film has some of the director's most overt humor. The punning use of "encrypted" is part of his love of wordplay, as are some of the character names. Karsh's last name is "Relikh", which is something left behind by death, and the woman he is on a date with at the start of the film is named "Myrna Shovlin," a name that has meaning given that the restaurant is in the middle of a cemetery and if you think of grave-digging as shoveling. It's gallows humor, true, but it's not out of character. Maybe because I'm getting older too, I respond to this stuff more than I might have when I was a callow youth. I've appreciated some of the director's films in the abstract--I don't connect with Naked Lunch on most levels at all--but not this one. I had a visceral (hah!) reaction to this. I "get" what this film is doing regardless of whether or not the details of the plot mean anything at all. When the film's final revelations are offered, it felt to me like someone was walking over my own grave.
Notes: The story of Elizabeth Siddal and her husband has been told on film in a 1967 film for television by director Ken Russell titled "Dante's Inferno." It exists on video online, though the quality of presentation is dubious at best. Oliver Reed and Judith Paris played the leads.
Many apologies to anyone who may have landed here while searching for the novel Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers. I've read it. I like it.
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