The Shrouds (2024) — Cronenberg’s ponderous, inept self-portrait of grief

An innovative businessman and grieving widower builds a device to connect with the dead inside a burial shroud.

The first thing that anybody who’s ever heard David Cronenberg’s name should know about The Shrouds is that it’s one of his tamest. Strictly speaking, it shouldn’t even count as “horror”: even the intended grimness doesn’t come off. Likewise, this latest from the 82-year-old who brought us The Brood (1979), The Fly (1986), and A History of Violence (2005), might better be the last thing for a casual moviegoer to see without the experience of his other works.

It isn’t unlikeable, exactly, nor boring to an excruciating degree; yet it managed to elicit so little reaction in me that I wonder if it’s the distance created by a grief-stricken man retreating into himself, keeping his feelings private, or just plain listlessness, an edge of “sensibility” dulled by all the soul-wrestling, emptied of marrow. In an interview for The Wrap, Cronenberg, who wrote the material for Netflix after losing his wife to an aggressive form of cancer in 2017, was insistent that the movie was not personal to him in any emotionally poignant way.

But did making “The Shrouds” prove cathartic in any way? Did he feel better after the movie was done? “No,” Cronenberg said, concisely. He said he’s asked the question a lot since the film premiered at Cannes last summer. And the answer is always the same. “Art is not therapy. If I had not made the movie, I would be feeling exactly the same way as I do now, in terms of my emotion, my attachment to my past and my wife,” Cronenberg explained.

Vincent Cassel as Karsh & Diane Kruger as Terry in ‘The Shrouds’ — Credit: Saint Laurent

Had he not tried to generalise his impotence under the banner of “art”, which also demeans the term, it would’ve seemed less desperate on his part. Forcing oneself to be moved or “affected” by artsy drabs is a special skill of the arthouse and festival audience, but sometimes in Cronenberg films there is enough going on at the surface to want to keep engaged, that is, before interest drains like a lead-acid battery. In Videodrome (1983), the story all but disappears under the ideas and metaphors on media manipulation that get piled up; in Crash (1996), there isn’t a narrative through-line to begin with. Imageries and set pieces carry with them the odour of having been reverse-engineered to “convey the point”, and that, I think, is about as far as his “art” goes. Such are the norms across the board in Cronenberg’s filmography, and I suppose you can’t blame him if he doesn’t see the appeal of putting your own feelings and emotions into perspective through film, if he has the same notion of an “idea” as a dense Continental “philosopher” who prides himself on his own density.