Kalyn CorriganDeath is impossible. It’s a door that you keep waiting to swing open, announcing the entrance of a dinner date who never arrives, or the recurring dream of a person whose prolonged absence makes their face appear fuzzy. For director David Cronenberg, death is a muse, and his grief is the driving force behind his latest masterpiece. The Shrouds is a movie that seeks solace through modern technology, and hopes to provide an answer to the timeless question: can art serve as an act of catharsis?
Starring Vincent Cassel as the widower Karsh, a prominent businessman who has made melancholy his main means of commerce, The Shrouds is set in an eerie, deceptively placid near-future wherein the tech mogul has developed a new way to mourn. By using software that places a series of cameras in the coffin with the deceased, the specially rigged blanket, or “shroud” if you will, envelopes the lost loved one and captures their body in real time, tapping into the designer’s “GraveTech” app system, and affording the bereaved the opportunity to witness their departed decaying as they lie buried in the earth.
“It came to me because I had that feeling,” remembers Cronenberg. “My wife of forty-three years had died, and when she was being buried, I thought, I can’t, I really, the idea of her being alone in the grave really is driving me crazy, and it’s very upsetting to me. And I would love to actually get into the coffin with her and be buried with her. Except of course, you can’t do that, because then you’d be dead. So you don’t do that. But I thought, well, what if there was a guy who was a high tech entrepreneur, and he found a way to at least give him some sense that he could follow her in the grave after death. And that really was the beginning. That was the idea. It was from my own feeling of separation.”
David Cronenberg (Caitlin Cronenberg)
ritten in a fictionalized format as a way to cope with the loss of Cronenberg’s wife Carolyn, the film follows Karsh as he reckons with the death of his partner Becca (Diane Kruger) after she was ultimately claimed by cancer. As he seeks to spread his empire of highly innovative cemetery technology, the entrepreneur navigates the murky waters of posthumous medical conspiracies, falls into a peculiar relationship with his late wife’s twin sister Terry (also played by Diane Kruger), and attempts to hunt down the vandals who desecrated his beloved’s burial ground.
During an early scene in the movie, Karsh brings a blind date to a restaurant he owns that happens to be stationed within the confines of one of his many memorial properties. A self-proclaimed nonbeliever, the casually confrontational Karsh regales his date with stories of drawing inspiration from The Shroud of Turin before leading her a short twenty yards away to visit the resting place of his former spouse. Much like the director himself, Karsh speaks calmly, but uses screens to project the turmoil he feels within. One can’t help but wonder if the ancient concept is merely being played satirically, almost as if the point is to mock religion and all of its myriad followers.
“It just seemed a natural thing that if he said, ‘I invented The Shrouds,’ and then he has a very smart blind date who basically says, ‘You obviously didn’t invent shrouds, because what about the Shroud of Turin?’” explains Cronenberg. “At which point he says, ‘Well, that’s a fake,’ which it is, by the way. But of course, a lot of people want to believe in it. It’s a relic of Christ and so on. Because those questions are the questions that he, in trying to expand his empire of high tech cemeteries, would have to deal with.”
Raised in Toronto, Ontario, in a progressive Jewish family, the filmmaker now describes himself as an “anti-believer,” opting to use religious material as a source for storytelling, rather than a code of conduct for morality. Much like the character of Karsh, he approaches it logically, like a businessman. “If he goes to a very Catholic country, he’s going to have opposition to his sort of high tech atheistic style of cemeteries. There would always be political questions, religious questions, economic questions, in every country that he would try to establish this cemetery. I was just trying to allude to those things that he had to think about.”
A still from “The Shrouds” (Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films)
Startlingly semi-autobiographical, it’s hard not to draw connections between director Cronenberg and his leading man Vincent Cassel. The Shrouds marks the fourth time that the pair have worked together, but it’s perhaps the first engagement where the renowned actor took on such an inherently personal project for the legendary filmmaker.
“He and I both discussed this character as being quite different from the tough guys that he normally plays,” says Cronenberg, “And he said it is a great challenge for him, because it’s the most dialogue he’s ever had in any movie that he’s ever made — in French or any other language. So, all of those things come together.”
Tall and lean, draped in finely tailored dark clothing with a pronounced gray pompadour on top, Cassel’s Karsh could easily be a stand-in for Cronenberg on one of his sets. “And then of course, he decided that he was really playing a character based on me. This was his decision. I didn’t say that he should. And to do that, it meant that he would speak more like I do. It’s more chill, more quiet, more calm, less aggressive. More Canadian, in fact,” the director smiles. “Even the way that he moved, he would observe me, and the way he would speak, and so on, was based on me. As I said, this is how we shaped the character, and Vincent, I knew he could do it.”
Anyone who knows anything about genre film is well aware that director Cronenberg is one of our greatest gifts in cinema. An auteur born out of the depths of a rigid Canadian system, the trailblazer has been redefining what pictures can look like ever since his 1975 debut Shivers sent tingles down the spines of everyone who watched it (even those working at the Parliament of Canada at the time of its release). However, as much as his work startled movie-goers, he enthralled them as well. Rabid, his 1977 follow-up about a woman recovering from plastic surgery after a serious motorcycle accident, plays like a sustained bout of fever, and earned the director over a million dollars in his native homeland, becoming one of Canada’s highest grossing films ever made at the time.
(Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films)
The filmmaker would go on to make an insanely impressive series of back-to-back standouts, including 1979’s The Brood, 1981’s Scanners, 1983’s Videodrome and The Dead Zone, and 1986’s The Fly. Later, he would lean into more accessible, straightforward dramatic works like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, but his art always circles back around to the same exploration of the human condition, emphasized by his focus on the human body.
There’s a moment midway through The Shrouds when a character tells Karsh, “You’ve made a career out of bodies,” a comment that serves both as an astute observation of the fictional tycoon and a more meta double meaning of the man behind the writing on the page. Still, despite the fact that the term “body horror” and “Cronenbergian” are thrown around quite frequently these days to describe any sort of modification to the flesh in film, the man himself admittedly doesn’t quite understand why his name is used as an adjective. But he doesn’t hate it.
“I always loved the idea of, you know, when there was [Federico] Fellini, there was ‘Fellini-esque,’ and then when there was Ingmar Bergman, ‘Bergmanesque,’ and I like that idea.” Naturally, Cronenberg, who claims he knew movies could be art after watching La Strada for the very first time as a boy, would feel somewhat honored to be considered in a similar fashion as his own cinematic hero.
“I thought well, if you’re really going to be a filmmaker who has a kind of perspective of sensibility to the world of cinema, you should become an adjective. It would be good if you became an adjective, and so if I have, there is ‘Cronenbergian,’ and I accept that.” He adds, “As for the term ‘body horror,’ I don’t even know what body horror is, that never really made sense to me. That’s not a good expression. I didn’t come up with it, and I don’t really relate to it directly. So, that’s a whole other thing.”
(Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films)
If the body is reality, and all we are is how we spend our days, then does the soul exist within a movie made by a man who doesn’t believe in the afterlife?
“Well, the answer is in the movie, and the answer is no, it does not exist,” says Cronenberg. “The soul is the body, and when the body dies, there is no soul. It doesn’t mean that there’s not some sense of disembodiment. Christopher Hitchens, who was sort of an English writer, journalist, philosopher, very succinctly, said, ‘Death causes religion. The function of religion, primarily every religion, is to deny the reality of death.’ So, it’s like, you will karmically recycle, and you’ll be reincarnated, or you will go to heaven, and you’ll meet everybody there, and it’ll be okay. You won’t really die, it won’t really be oblivion.”
Typically, a filmmaker of his magnitude would be concerned about the impact that they’ve made on cinema, and how they will be remembered after they’re gone. “I don’t really think about my legacy, because it’s irrelevant to me,” insists the director. “In the grand sense, you know. Once you’re dead, you’re not worrying about your legacy. And that would be truly what you’re talking about as a legacy. I mean, I’m not making films to leave a legacy. I’m doing it to explore the human condition, basically, through my art.”
Regarding his stance on the lack of life after death, the director quietly digs his heels in. “I think it’s very difficult for a human being to imagine nonexistence. How do you imagine yourself before you were born? You can’t. You can’t really do that. But if you are an atheist or an existentialist, let’s say, you have decided to accept the reality of death as the end of your existence. And that’s a tough thing to accept. It’s really hard to do. So, you can be forgiven for saying, ‘Well, no, there’ll be some kind of afterlife, and there’ll be a soul separate from the body.”
Although he is clearly not a product of his environment, in a way, his roots still shine through. “I begin the movie with the Jewish idea of the soul and the body. But that’s not because Karsh believes in it. It’s because it’s a sort of beautiful fantasy that he’s dreaming in his dentist chair as he’s under endocytosis.”
(Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films)
Whether he’s being piloted by his self-driving Tesla, or touring the grounds at his established burial site, Karsh often finds himself surrounded by a slew of screens. He keeps a close eye on his wife’s remains via his GraveTech app, viewing her body from a safe distance, encased inside of a black mirror. Yet when his graveyard is vandalized, and he has the opportunity to see her corpse in person, he flatly refuses. Despite the fact that Cronenberg himself has virtually zero online presence, he still grapples with the anonymity that social media provides the masses, and society’s refusal to face reality.
“I mean, there’s a lot of denial,” comments Cronenberg. “Nonetheless, even though he’s accepting her death as a bodily final thing, there’s still a lot of denial in him, the character. And it comes out in small ways. And that’s one of the ways.” He continues, “When I was talking to Howard Shore about the music, one of the things we wanted the music to do was to suggest the other part of him — the non-controlled part, the part that was in total agony, and despair, and melancholy over his wife’s death.The emotional part of himself that he only allows to be shown every once in a while.”
Like Stanley Kubrick before him, Cronenberg’s movies have always been a little prophetic. Gems like Videodrome, Crimes of the Future and eXistenZ have proven themselves to be ahead of their time, showing glimpses of what the future would hold, and the way that we as individuals interact with media. Knowing this, it’s not much of a reach to assume that in a few years time, GraveTech could become a possibility in real life.
“It technically is possible right now,” muses the director. “I mean, this is not a science fiction movie. This technology — which I’ve invented, but it’s mainly just cameras in a coffin with lighting. And so it would be very doable, actually. I’m willing to sell franchises if anybody’s interested.”
Karsh believes that there’s a worldwide market for these kinds of high-tech graves. He even travels to Hungary, hoping to extend the shadow of his ever-reaching kingdom. “Whether people really want this or not, I’m not sure,” Cronenberg says with a contemplative pause. “I think there are people who would do this. I would have done it. People have asked me if I would have done this vis-à-vis my wife, if I had been able to, if the technology had been there. And I say yes, I would have. I actually would. So, I can’t be alone amongst the billions of people on earth in this. I assume that there would be a market for it.”
(Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films)
Naturally, when such scientific advancements are made, they are shrouded in paranoia and conspiracy. While surveying the damage on his property, fear gnaws openly at Karsh. Who could have done this, and why now? Is someone tapping into his system? Are his burial spots being targeted by the government to set up a connected, overarching program to spy on its citizens while they mourn their dead?
“When someone close to you dies, especially at a young age, it seems to have no meaning,” Cronenberg reflects. “It seems ridiculous. It seems meaningless. Was it just random genetic problems that caused this disease? Or if whoever this is was hit by a car, randomly crossing the street? Why this person? Why at this moment? We have evolved to look for meaning in everything.
“And to make grief bearable, people develop a kind of conspiracy attitude. ‘The doctors did it wrong. The doctors didn’t take care of her well enough. They gave her the wrong chemotherapy. There was a new medical technology they should have used, or we should have taken her to another clinic.” The director continues, ”Or was there something more sinister going on? Why her death now?’ Conspiracy theories give you a sense that you know more than other people. That you’re seeing through a facade that’s meant to obscure things. It gives you a sense of empowerment, and a sense of meaning. That’s the way I was looking at it: the grief conspiracy affects us where they come together.”
Still, one can’t help but chuckle at the otherworldliness of it all. If there’s one thing that Cronenberg’s masterworks all have in common, it’s that they’re quite funny, despite the fact that the humor is lost on most audiences.
(Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films)
“All of my movies are funny, actually,” the director grins. “And I think a lot of them are really comedies. I mean, weirdly, I could say The Shrouds is a romantic comedy. It has funny, sexy stuff going on, like a rom-com, perhaps. It’s because, I think, humans have evolved a sense of humor in order to survive what their brain gives them. The absurdity of life, the shortness of life, the reality of death. All of these things are very difficult for people to take, and there’s a lot of pain and suffering in life. If you live long enough, you will experience it, and how do you survive that?
“One of the ways is humor — you have to be able to laugh at some of these things, however tough, however difficult, however dire. So, to me, I don’t think, ‘Oh, I must inject some humor in this.’ It’s there automatically, just the mood. My characters are funny. They have a life of their own, and they say funny things.”
Approaching such familiar subject matter with a heavy heart might feel overwhelming for many filmmakers, or on the opposite end of the spectrum, potentially gratifying. Cronenberg isn’t so lucky. “There’s no solace for grief, I’m afraid,” says the filmmaker. “There was an Italian psychiatrist who came to my house in Toronto because he liked to write about cinema from a psychiatric point of view. At one point he asked me how I was dealing with my grief, and I said, ‘Well, I’m suffering. That’s how I’m dealing with it.’ And he said, ‘Oh okay, I don’t think you need therapy.’”
Time hasn’t made the master any less radical. No matter how unpleasant his nosedive into uncomfortable truths might be, he still stands ready and willing to deliver the unmentionable. Making people squirm is just a bonus. “As an artist, that’s what you want to do, is talk about the things that are unspeakable, you know?” He states proudly. “I mean, that’s your territory, as far as I feel. And it felt very natural and realistic for me to do that.”