Cemetery of splendour: David Cronenberg on The Shrouds

“Tell me about this body thing. You’ve made a career out of bodies,” says Terry (Diane Kruger) in The Shrouds. She is speaking to her brother-in-law Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a widower who owns GraveTech, a company that supplies the living with a direct video link to the corpses of their loved ones as they rot in the ground. But her words could just as easily be addressed to David Cronenberg, who has been telling us about the ick and ooze and heat of “this body thing” like no other filmmaker for some 50 years.

In The Shrouds, the Canadian director blends elements of the corporeal horror for which is he renowned with the twists and turns of a cybersecurity thriller. On the one hand, there is Karsh, a “corpse voyeur” with silver hair that resembles Cronenberg’s, who attempts to master the loss of his cherished wife (also played by Kruger, uncannily). On the other, there is an intrigue that begins with an attack on the post-cinematic cemetery Karsh owns, plunging him into a plot that defies comprehension and resolution. Paranoia prevails, especially where new technologies are involved. These two threads of The Shrouds might seem to pull in different directions, but to see them as in conflict would be wrong. In this darkly funny film, Cronenberg forges unity not out of the logic of genre but rather by working across tonalities and tropes to pose a deeply philosophical question: what consolations are available to vulnerable, mortal humans as they face a world evacuated of meaning?

Cinema has long been understood as muddling the boundary between the living and the dead. When André Bazin’s essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ was first published in 1945, the author accompanied his account of film as “change mummified” with a single illustration: the Shroud of Turin. Film has been said to be a memento mori and a denial of the end that awaits us all. In The Shrouds, a work very much about our relationship to moving-image media, Cronenberg sketches the contours of a new era, rethinking such ideas in relation to technological change. Electronic liveness prevails over the pastness of the photographic trace and machines simulate sentience. Karsh swiftly dismisses as fake the linen cloth that supposedly bears a miraculous imprint of the body of Christ, emphasising how his live feeds of the decaying dead are the real deal, presenting the real thing in real time. Meanwhile, his AI assistant Hunny (based on and voiced by Kruger, uncannily again) is an unsettling creature of machinic vitality, trying (and ultimately failing) to provide intimate companionship. By focusing so much on these technologies – to say nothing of how often the film raises the issue of ‘dataveillance’ – Cronenberg shows how fully every aspect of contemporary existence, right down to the fleshy mess of sex and death, is entangled with digital tools that both help us and deceive us, and which operate in ways that elude our understanding.

There are, however, at least two glimmers of utopia within all this. First, in its portrayal of a widower’s suffering, The Shrouds shows itself to be most concerned with a form of connectivity that has little to do with fibre-optic networks or conspiracy theories, and everything to do with the kind of bond that can exist between two bodies. And second, in making a film so intellectually stimulating and immensely pleasurable, Cronenberg reminds us of something he has always stood for, but which is all too easy to forget today: there need not be any incompatibility between a cinema of entertainment and a cinema of thought.

Erika Balsom: GraveTech and ShroudCam are both compound words that combine something ancient with something modern. Today, death tends to be sequestered and denied. Yet you have made a film in which it is not only front and centre but also collides with technological innovation.

David Cronenberg: It wasn’t like I woke up one day and said, “Gee, people haven’t been paying enough attention to funerary matters and burial.” It really had to do with the burial of my wife [in 2017]. I had attended quite a few burials, including my parents, but this was different. I was surprised at my reactions, and it surprised me that I could be surprised. You anticipate the death of somebody, but when it happens, it’s suddenly a new thing, completely unexpected. Karsh says, “I wanted to get into the box with her,” and I totally did.

But once you start to write the script, it ceases to be autobiography. No matter how many lines of dialogue were actually spoken by someone, it becomes fiction. Karsh, unlike me, is a high-tech entrepreneur. His grief strategy, as Terry calls it, is to deal with his grief in a technological way because that’s his means of creativity. You could say that just as he has created GraveTech and all that goes with it, I have made the movie about GraveTech. It’s my version of being Karsh, but it’s different, obviously.

Karsh’s grief is so physical. We are told that it is rotting his teeth, and when he talks about his wife, he often talks about her body. This corporeal way of thinking about grief strikes me as very different than the metaphysical things we often hear about death and souls.

Yes. When my wife died, I read all the grief books. There is C.S. Lewis and Julian Barnes, and of course Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking [2005]. When I read that, it struck me how non-physical it was. She missed her dead husband’s voice in the other room, and his intellect and his humour, but she didn’t ever mention his body. I found that really extraordinary and I thought, “Well, grief is obviously a very specific and personal kind of thing. It will vary from person to person.”

It’s interesting you mention Didion, because she’s renowned for her coldness, which is something that is often said of your films. Part of what makes Vincent Cassel’s performance so amazing in The Shrouds is its flattened quality. Is this something you cultivate in your work with actors?

I don’t cultivate it, but there have been some grief TV series, and they always seem to be very sentimental, which I have always abhorred. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that sentimentality is the death of true feeling. I deliberately don’t have flashbacks to when they first met, all these wonderful moments in slow motion with sun backlighting their hair. Vincent [Cassel] has a flattened affect and is controlled because he can’t let it out, but the music is telling you what’s going on underneath. It’s very melancholic and desperate. You have to put those together to get the full Karsh sensibility.

This chimes with the way that things are not always, or maybe not ever, what they seem in this movie. There is a lot of deception and paranoia. Characters search for certainty, but the film really does not want to provide it.

Yes, because it’s trying to be realistic. [Laughs] On your deathbed, you say, “Yeah, everything’s been resolved.” Whoever died like that? Nobody. Living to be 82 as I am, I have experienced the death of many people. There’s always that sense of wondering, why did this happen? Death seems to be meaningless, absurd and impossible – hence the rise of many religions. It’s really difficult to accept that death and therefore life is meaningless.

One of the ways you can combat that, consciously or unconsciously, is to think that there’s something else going on. It couldn’t just be that this disease came from nowhere and killed this person who is a complete universe. There must be a reason. It might be that the doctors weren’t careful and they were doing something they shouldn’t have been doing, some alternate treatment that they didn’t tell you about. Conspiracy can be a survival strategy and a grief strategy.

It’s in this sense that the film has a very profound philosophical unity. At the level of genre, it seems to pull in two different directions, but it’s very unified in relation to what you’ve just said.

I love hearing you say that. [Laughs] I have gotten some reviews saying that the movie falls apart because suddenly, instead of dealing with this wonderful intense grief, Cronenberg has gone off into outer space to deal with international conspiracy. But I meant it the way you received it. Either you are taking pleasure and strength out of the standard structure of a genre picture, or you’re not. Maybe you’re taking strength and pleasure out of breaking that apart and seeing what’s inside. That’s normally what I tend to do.

The Shrouds has elements of body horror, which is something you’re very well known for. After eXistenZ [1999], you moved away from this a bit, before returning to it with Crimes of the Future [2022]. Here it continues. Do you have a sense of what prompted this return?

People say, “It’s interesting that Cronenberg chose now to do Dead Ringers [1988]”, for example. And I say, but I didn’t choose it. It’s because we finally got an actor, and we could get financing. I wanted to do Dead Ringers maybe ten years before. It’s charming that people think you just choose, “Oh, now I’m going to do this because it takes me to another genre.”

It’s the myth of the freedom of the auteur.

It’s the mythology, yeah. I’ve talked to Marty Scorsese about that very same thing. It doesn’t matter how respected or successful you are, there are always problems of the real world impinging on your auteur-ness. After my wife died, I really didn’t think I had the heart to make any more movies. My producer Robert Lantos was pressuring me to take out Crimes of the Future again, which was a script I had written 20 years before. I thought, “Well, why would I do that? I’m sure it’s completely irrelevant now.” And he said, “No, you should read your own script. It’s more relevant than ever.” I thought that was a pretty good line for a producer. I read it and I thought he was right. That’s what brought me back to directing. After that, I thought, “I really have to deal with the death of a wife.” It came from a different impulse entirely from the one that led me to do Crimes of the Future.

It’s notable that this is a co-production between Canada and France. You are working with Saint Laurent Productions and Saïd Ben Saïd, a producer who’s known for supporting directors who want to do daring projects, and you have state funding, which has historically been very important to you. To what extent would you say this combination of factors is necessary for you to make the kind of cinema you want to make? Could you be you within an American model?

No. There is the odd project, like A History of Violence [2005], that could be and was done within the American structure. But basically, I’m a Canadian indie filmmaker. Working with a Canada-EU co-production is very comfortable for me. Long ago, when there was the creation of the Canadian Film Development Corporation, which later became Telefilm Canada, it was beginning to be understood that national cinemas around the world had to be government supported in order to have any success in getting films that weren’t American into theatres. Hollywood was just so successful and so strong. It was felt that Canadians, like the French or the Germans, needed government support to survive and to flourish. It’s true that the Canadian tax shelter era of the 1970s was a bit wild and woolly, and some very bad films got made [laughs], but at least they got made. It’s developed now into something more like a European model. Without government support, independent filmmaking would have a very hard time. It might disappear completely.

The ShroudCam allows the living to see the dead as they’re decomposing. Karsh says, “I’m involved in her body the way I was in life, only even more.” This statement says a lot about our relationship to moving images.

Sometimes people say about babies, “I could just eat ’em up, I could eat that baby up.” [Laughs] What does that mean? It’s a real impulse. It doesn’t mean you want to actually eat the baby, but you want the baby. It’s that feeling. You have been so passionately involved with this person, with the physical part being the primordial grounding part. It connects you to that primordial part of human and animal existence. It’s not like you really want to see the inside of this person’s body, but in a way you sort of do. Sex always involves an interpenetration of bodies. It’s a relationship that you couldn’t really have when the person was alive, unless you were a surgeon and did a lot of surgery on your lover. Maybe that’s my next movie, or maybe I did that with Crimes of the Future already.

Walter Benjamin compared the cinematographer to a surgeon because cinema allows us to dissect things and penetrate them in ways that unmediated vision can’t.

One of the attractions of certain kinds of cinema is exactly that. You envy a surgeon who really gets to see the inside of a lot of bodies and gets to see the reality of what the entire human body is and how it functions. For most people, it would be quite a shock. OK, you say there’s a heart, but what does it look like? What does the inside of a heart look like when it’s beating, and those valves are opening and closing? I want to see that. [Laughs] It’s not like I want to kill anybody. I just want to see how it all works. When you factor love and passion into that, it’s a pretty potent combination.

Hunny, the AI assistant, becomes a replacement female companion for Karsh. Today many people are panicking, obsessing and fantasising about how AI is already in the process of changing everything. Hunny is not reliable and she’s not even very nice.

When I wrote the script, ChatGPT had not been unleashed on the public. That was the key moment when suddenly people realised that AI had been developed in this massive way. Hunny is a deliberately unsophisticated version of AI. Karsh could have created an uncanny version of Becca to be Hunny, so that she would look amazingly like his real wife, which is of course what people are doing now. Apparently people have constructed avatars that look exactly like their dead spouses. Since the advent of the iPhone, there is enough data on almost everybody to create one. “How did she make that spaghetti bolognese?” Well, she’s dead now, but I can summon her up on my phone and ask her. Instead of just asking Siri or ChatGPT, you can ask your dead wife or husband. It would be as though this person were alive and in some other city for the time being but eventually might come home. What that will do to people and their grief strategy [laughs] I have no idea. It could exacerbate the sense of loss. I have a feeling it would do that. I sometimes have difficulty looking at photos of my wife. Even though they’re precious to me, there’s an incredible pain. These lifelike avatars could really hurt you.

The Shrouds is very dark, in terms of the portrait it offers of technologised existence.

Yeah. But it’s funny, you have to admit.

I found it hilarious, but when I mentioned it to a friend of mine who’s British, he told me he liked it a lot but didn’t find it funny. “Maybe it’s a Canadian thing,” he said.

[Laughs]

There’s such a complex tonality in the film.

I agree. But if I’m in the audience, I want to hear you laugh. Talking about survival strategies and grief strategies, you have to have a sense of humour. I think all my films are funny in some way or another. ‘Complex tonality’ is a nice phrase to describe it, because it’s not obviously just funny. We’ve evolved a sense of humour and it’s a survival strategy that allows communality and understanding. It takes the pressure off the difficulty of having a human brain, which just sees everything and does everything, and is so complex and difficult. You have to laugh.

Terry has a kink for conspiracy. I thought I’d heard of all the kinks in the world, but this one was new. It connects to a vision of sexuality across your work that is very expansive. In your films, sexuality can come from anywhere and is everywhere. It becomes unlinked from the things that are most typically codified as sexy. This feels very emancipatory to me.

I like that very much. [Laughs] If I have added a new item to the bible of kink, I’d be very proud. For some people, creativity is sexually attractive. It’s an allure. I think this is why a lot of artists have lots of lovers. [Laughs] For Terry, coming up with a really interesting conspiracy theory is hot. It falls in line with the idea of creativity as an attraction.