There is a question – which has spawned countless philosophical debates and a vast array of cultural, social, religious, and spiritual practices and rituals – that emerged alongside the first civilisations and continues to receive new answers: namely, what happens to the body after death? Or, more precisely, how do living bodies act in the presence and proximity of the deceased? In The Shrouds, the eternal futurist David Cronenberg presents a hypothetical answer so disturbing that it elicits only two possible reactions – it can either be embraced with a kind of macabre fascination or wholly rejected as revolting: the concept of a digital grave that can be accessed at any time by the bereaved relatives of the deceased, allowing them to watch in real time a live-streamed image of the earthly remains of their (once) loved one.

As we’ve come to expect from him, the great Canadian filmmaker sets his story in a future so near it feels like it’s already here. Moreover, certain scenes in the film, such as the long take where we follow the fine, unnatural movements of a self-driving car steering wheel, seem to underline the thinning line between the technology we use in our daily lives and the one imagined by futurists like Cronenberg. It’s a recurring theme in his filmography: consider, for example, the anguish caused by a now obsolete object – the cathode-ray tube TV screen in Videodrome (1983), showing a Debbie Harry (playing the projection of a missing, most likely dead, character) urging protagonist Max Renn to leave behind the “old flesh” of the body. The same screen from which a grotesque hand à la H.R. Giger (made of both pixels and phallic excrescences) emerges and points a gun at him, firing imaginary bullets; not to mention the grand finale, where the same TV broadcasts Renn’s suicide, as a way to access another spiritual plane.

As in Videodrome, death is the major theme explored in The Shrouds. But this time, death is no longer a ritual for accessing a “higher” form of life, where physical existence is abandoned in favour of a pure Geist existence. On the contrary, this time death is a fait accompli around which the living build various systems to make a fragile peace with it. As mentioned above, the Shroud is a technologized grave that allows friends and family to access one of the most inaccessible (and terrifying) primal images – that of the body of their loved one in the process of decomposition. A technology shepherded by a certain Karsh (played by a stellar Vincent Cassel), owner of the company GraveTech, who serves as both a cypher for the filmmaker and a brilliant satirical symbol of Silicon Valley tech moguls, initially seen as futuristic and vaguely inaccessible geniuses, but who ultimately reveal themselves to be somewhat… bumbling in practice. (There’s definitely a bit of Elon Musk in this character.)

When GraveTech cemeteries begin to be vandalised by a criminal hand whose origins and intentions are unclear, The Shrouds opens up, along with the search for the perpetrators, a range of essential themes: from the movement of technology across the world via a globalised economy, where the production chain is fragmented across multiple countries (see the fantastic FaceTime cameo by the great Icelandic actor Ingvar Sigurðsson, starring as an environmental activist negotiating the placement of a GraveTech cemetery in his country), to the way technology comes to meet fundamental human experiences, such as that of mourning.

For at its core, The Shrouds is a film about grief: beyond the fact that Karsh’s empire is built on the death of his much-loved wife (played by Diane Kruger, in a biographical parallel), at the heart of the film is the pain of losing access to both the body and the spirit of the loved one. Hence the elusive yet Promethean desire to cling to a remnant that exists not only on an emotional, memorial level (and how voluptuous are the scenes in which the protagonist recalls the intimacy he shared with his wife), but more importantly, material: through the image of this body that continues to transform underground, through ersatz figures like her sister, or through a whole system created around her death, that allows their connection to persist daily, albeit under different circumstances.

The unbearable tension between the virtual and the real (and, by extension, between ego and superego) is always driven by sexual impulses (namely, the id) in Cronenberg’s cinema, which makes him arguably the greatest Freudian filmmaker of our time. Even a quick glance at Freud’s theory (especially regarding the mechanisms of anxiety, the three major types of anxiety, and their links to repression) confirms this thesis. The Shrouds similarly investigates the junction between Freudian sexual anxiety and technology in the undercurrents of its main narrative. Even though it does so in a late style that focuses on the psychological over the explicit – a controversial style (if we look at Letterboxd reviews); there is still a large segment of cinephiles who criticise his shift toward a more dialogic and dialectical cinema, overlooking the fact that his early films (like Crimes of the Future, 1970) operated in a very similar zone.

In a year when much of the middlebrow cinephile crowd raved about one of the most abject films of the decade – The Substance by Coralie Fargeat, whose conceptual vacuity and cruelty seek legitimacy through its claim to a broader body horror tradition – the very father of this tradition, David Cronenberg, arrives with a film (in the same Cannes competition) whose rhetorical and stylistic elegance opens up a wider and more nuanced space for debate and reflection on how “horror” insinuates itself into the recesses of contemporary life – and ultimately, a revision of its definition (and its inherent subjectivity). The result is one of the most philosophically, psychologically, and politically fertile films of the year.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.