Jason Bailey
It’s nothing more significant than coincidental timing, but it’s certainly unfortunate that David Cronenberg’s latest picture, The Shrouds, arrives in theaters just as Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This is finishing its current season, titled “The Old Man is Still Alive.” In it, she examines the late careers of a handful of Hollywood legends (including Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Vincente Minnelli) who were superstars in the industry’s Golden Age, and were still making pictures in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and beyond, “in spite of the challenges posed by massive cultural changes and their advanced age.” It’s a terrific notion for a deep dive, investigating the odd specificity adopted by some filmmakers late in their careers, as their increasing disconnection from the world around them results in work that less resembles real life than a removed, insular, cinematic pseudo-reality.
David Cronenberg is currently 82 years old. He’s one of the most influential filmmakers of his generation; like David Lynch, he’s a director whose mere name conjures up a specific style, a definable aesthetic, even though he never repeated himself or went for the easy hit. And yet, his new film could sit snugly alongside the likes of Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain and Hawks’s Rio Lobo— the work of a gifted artist, past his prime.
It starts off with promise. The opening sequence shows us a woman, her nude, rotting body in some sort of suspended animation, while a man watches from a window and howls in pain. This is a dream sequence, or a nightmare; the man is Karsh (Vincent Cassell), a producer who’s become an inventor and entrepreneur, and the woman is his wife Becca (Diane Kruger), who died some time before. He’s not taking it well — “Grief is rotting your teeth,” his dentist informs him.
To cope with his grief, he’s developed a technology called GraveTech, which wraps the recently departed in an electronic shroud which captures 3-D images of their decaying body and puts them on a screen on their gravestone. “I can see what’s happening to her,” he explains. “I’m in the grave with her. And it makes me happy.” The company only has one facility so far, but they’re looking at expansion into several countries, and at some high profile clients (prompting the memorable line, “I want this! I want his rotting body in our cemetery”).
But for all of this effort, Karsh cannot shake her memory. She still comes to him in dreams, mixtures of memories and nightmares that linger on the details of her disease “eating away” at her. And she’s ever present in the form of her sister (also played by Kruger), who split with one of Karsh’s business associates. (Kruger also provides the voice of his AI assistant.)
Her double-casting recalls Cronenberg’s mesmerizing Dead Ringers, and not in a good way; it reminds us of what this man can do when he’s at full power, which he clearly is not here. The Shrouds also replicates that picture’s quiet menace, which has become something of a de facto mode for him. I’ll confess to nodding off a bit during his last film, Crimes of the Future (don’t worry, I wasn’t reviewing it), not because it’s dull, but because it’s so quiet, so modest and mellow, with its characters barely speaking above a whisper. The new film is in that same mold, but this time it leads to a sense of monotony, even as the plotting and characters grow increasingly silly. (Cronenberg was able to make people getting turned on by car wrecks into riveting and believable cinema, but there’s a much simpler seduction scene here that isn’t remotely credible— it just gets bad laughs.)
There are compelling ideas floating around in The Shrouds, but the connective tissue is too tenuous. The actors try their best, but Cassell and Kruger, both skilled, are lost at sea. Poor Guy Pearce ends up unloading reams of exposition, to no avail. In fact, the endless chatter is what’s most off-putting about the picture; this brilliant visual stylist has become a court stenographer, giving us two hours of people standing in rooms, spouting stilted dialogue, long-winded theories, and repetitive thematic digressions at each other.
There’s no shame in a filmmaker losing their fastball — it happens all the time (though not every time, as someone should remind Quentin Tarantino, with the most recent Scorsese and Wiseman pictures serving as strong counter-arguments) — so it’s not so much that The Shrouds is an embarrassment as it is an unforced error. It prompts a simple question: would this film have even made it into the festival circuit, much less to a theater near you, if it were helmed by an unknown?
C-
“The Shrouds” is out Friday in New York and Los Angeles. It opens everywhere on April 25.
