I’ve enjoyed David Cronenberg’s movies for most of my life, and he’s been highly respected for as long as I can remember, especially in horror circles, but also elsewhere. I was still a kid when THE FLY came out, and yet I remember it being a phenomenon, a genuine blockbuster that everyone talked about, with an appreciation for its weird grossness.

These days he’s a bigger icon than ever, but I feel his work is being unintentionally diminished by the way he’s been short-handed as the “body horror” guy. I don’t think he’d still be going if that was all there was to him. In the most recent issue of Fangoria, Phil Nobile Jr. did a great interview where he asked about that. Cronenberg said he was proud to have Coralie Fargeat and Julia Ducournau as his “cinema daughters,” but “I still don’t know what ‘body horror’ means.”

He’d be one of the greats even if he’d only done RABID, THE BROOD, SCANNERS and VIDEODROME, but then he went and had huge mainstream (but not at all sell out) success with THE DEAD ZONE and THE FLY. After that it was a decade-plus weirdo on-the-fringes-but-respected period all the way from DEAD RINGERS through SPIDER. Then, out of nowhere, the Viggronenberg trilogy of A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, EASTERN PROMISES and A DANGEROUS METHOD. That was followed by the Robert Pattinson duology I recently reviewed. And more recently CRIMES OF THE FUTURE. Continually evolving while always remaining connected to what was originally exciting about him, because what was originally exciting about him was him, and he doesn’t know how to make a movie without himself in it. Shit, even FAST COMPANY, pretty much the only “normal” movie he ever made! This is a director who has made vital movies in the ‘70s, ‘80s, ’90’s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s, which puts him in an elite category with Scorsese, Spielberg and Eastwood. So it doesn’t make sense to think of him as just a cult horror guy, although being the only one on that list who’s regularly covered in Fangoria does make him even cooler. (Though I strongly condemn his views on Midian.)

THE SHROUDS is distinctly Cronenbergian in its matter-of-fact depiction of a world tilted up just enough to see all the weird perversities wriggling around underneath. What feels most unusual about it is how directly personal it is: Vincent Cassel (SHEITAN) straight up stole Cronenberg’s hair to play the main character, Karsh, a successful, respected man mourning the loss of his wife; Cronenberg’s wife Carolyn (who was a P.A. on RABID and then edited THE BROOD and FAST COMPANY) died in 2017. And just like Cronenberg in making this movie, Karsh deals with his darkest feelings through his work, but in Karsh’s case that involves owning a cemetery and developing cutting edge new burial technology called GraveTech. Pretty different art form, but there’s a part where someone says he “made a career out of the body” or something like that (I should’ve written it down).

We learn what GraveTech is in the funniest way: he’s on a blind date with Myrna (Jennifer Dale, Once a Thief tv series), a divorcee who seems genuinely interested in hearing about his wife and his grieving, though she admits it’s intimidating for a potential new partner. He reveals that he owns the restaurant they’re eating in, which is connected to the cemetery, and when he asks Myrna if she’d like to see his wife’s grave she seems surprised but not too put off. Yeah, okay, why not?

So they walk down and the tombstones all have screens on them, which he explains can be turned on by loved ones through an app. Would you like to see her? Sure. But when she says yes she thinks she’ll be looking at some nice old photos of Becca or something. She didn’t understand that this GraveTech he’s talking about and this “shroud” he invented is a wrapping that creates a 3-D scan of the body. He brings up on the screen a view of the current state of his wife’s decomposing corpse, which he can rotate and zoom in on using his phone.

This kind of grim, uncomfortable, dry-as-a-bone humor is really up my alley: Karsh standing there waxing on about what they’re looking at, completely oblivious to how this women will react. We watch her face as she makes a valiant effort to hide her revulsion before giving up and dismissing herself from the date with a downright heroic level of politeness.

(Only later did it occur to me that this might be kind of what it would be like for Cronenberg to go on a date with a normie and try to explain what type of movies he makes.)

I would like to note at this point that many years ago I wrote a novel called Niketown, a weird crime story that grew out of the premise of graves having monitors on them, but mine just showed ads. The main character manages to get a high paying Pepsi ad on his mom’s grave and then gets some big affiliate checks because a famous rock star is buried in the same place and people making pilgrimages keep walking past his mom’s.

When I wrote that I had not experienced the loss of a parent. When I did I remember being at the funeral home and looking at a catalog of the different types of trinkets I could buy made out of my dad’s ashes. I remember thinking oh man, I would’ve written Niketown different if I’d experienced this. Even then I could never have reached how raw and personal Cronenberg’s idea is. I was using the grave just because it seemed like the most offensive thing to put advertisements on – a symbol for our modern inability to keep anything pure and sacred. I’m still so proud of that idea, but it kinda seems childish next to Cronenberg’s, where he’s dealing with his grief in such a revealing way – I miss her so much I want to watch her rot.

Not in a sick way, though. With technology. It’s okay. This is just a normal ordinary guy, the kind of guy who’s close with his dentist (Eric Weinthal, FIREHOUSE DOG), who sends him JPGs of his wife’s dental records to help him deal with his loss. In the email the doctor calls them “intimate photos.” One thing in this that I don’t usually detect in Cronenberg movies is that when the characters say crazy shit they sometimes could be joking. They say things wryly. I think sometimes they know it’s funny but they’re serious.

We see Becca (Diane Kruger, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS) in Karsh’s dreams, which also serve as flashbacks, though not entirely literal. In each one Becca becomes more mangled from surgeries during the progression of her cancer. They still try to have a sex life but she becomes horrifically fragile.

Kruger also plays Becca’s twin sister Terry, a dog groomer and good friend of Karsh’s who tries to help him with his sadness even though she’s dealing with her own. There’s a sexual tension between them because Terry makes vaguely flirtatious comments that Karsh either doesn’t pick up on or doesn’t want to acknowledge.

Then one night someone vandalizes the cemetery, damaging a bunch of the graves, including Becca’s – don’t worry, no TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE grisly works of art – and the system is hacked so that no one can view the shrouds anymore. So Karsh has to go to the guy who coded his security system, Maury (Guy Pearce, LOCKOUT), who’s Terry’s ex-husband and has gotten over the divorce about as well as Karsh has gotten over Becca’s death.

One of Maury’s questionable contributions to Karsh’s life is that he made him an A.I. assistant called “Hunny,” which Karsh reluctantly uses. Hunny is voiced by Kruger and her animated avatar is sort of a simplified cartoon version of her too. I suppose it’s up to interpretation whether Maury made her that way intentionally as a way for Karsh to hold onto the memory of Becca, or subconsciously because he’s obsessed with Terry, or whether it’s Cronenberg telling us subliminally that everything (or at least every woman) reminds Karsh of Becca. I love that Hunny has this cutesy Barbie doll design and demeanor but she sometimes seems to be hitting on him, and has little human details in her expressions or tone or pauses that reveal emotions like jealousy or taking offense at something but trying to hide it. Things that are creepy because they make no sense from a computer program, so seeing them brings into question, more than anything, Karsh’s grip on reality.

In classic Cronenberg fashion all this weird interpersonal stuff connects to gestures of a paranoid corporate espionage or conspiracy thriller. Plans are in motion to expand GraveTech to new locations, but there could be opposition from protesters in Iceland, or someone could be out to get him for other reasons. He also notices strange growths on the scans of Becca’s corpse, and becomes suspicious of her doctor, who was also an old boyfriend. There seems to really be some sort of conspiracy here, while Maury is very prone to conspiracy theories, but also maybe behind a real conspiracy, and by the way, hearing conspiracy theories makes Terry uncontrollably horny.

So Karsh begins affairs with Terry and with Soo-Min Szabo (Sandrine Holt, BALLISTIC: ECKS VS. SEVER, RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE, STARSHIP TROOPERS 2: HERO OF THE FEDERATION, TERMINATOR GENISYS), the blind wife of a CEO wanting to sponsor a cemetery in Budapest. In both cases he starts having MO’ BETTER BLUES style visions that he’s with Becca. When you think about this as an autobiographical story for Cronenberg you have to wonder – man, is he really getting it like that? I guess he ought to be, I just never think of him that way. Good for him though.

But as much as this is personal it’s not THE SHROUDS: THE DAVID CRONENBERG STORY. For example I read that the part about discovering his dead wife’s extra-marital affair came from something he heard about a neighbor growing up, not something he experienced himself. So I think even though Karsh is, in a way, David Cronenberg, I think we can also take it as a pretty good satire of contemporary America to have the hero of a thriller be a big shot super rich tech entrepreneur who’s paranoid and obsessed with death, and whose great innovation is just a bizarre extension of his own hangups, not something that’s gonna improve the world, and anyway it will ultimately be turned into a surveillance tool.

The one thing that didn’t work about the movie for me is probly a me problem. This was one of those movies where I didn’t realize it was about to end, so when it went to the credits I hadn’t been focused enough during the last scene to understand its significance as the ending. I was thinking oh, this is funny, there are women scheming for the right to be buried with Karsh. But then it ended mid-thought. I wasn’t ready to understand it. Maybe another time.

THE SHROUDS is actually the story that, a few years ago when CRIMES OF THE FUTURE came out, we learned Cronenberg had been developing as a series for Netflix and then the no good rat bastards pulled the plug on it. Here you go, one of our great directors of (at that time) five decades – here is a format where you can do what you want and it doesn’t matter how weird it is because our business model does not require anyone to ever watch it. It’s no skin off our ass if it’s not commercial, it makes zero difference. (One year later…) This is some weird shit, dude. Pass.

I imagine it’s really for the better, because I prefer movies, and this works as a movie. But also it would be pretty damn interesting to see how he would’ve treated it in a serialized format. Would it have been a longer version of this one story? Or would it have had some sort of serialized nature – maybe each episode tells the story of a different grave in the midst of the ongoing intrigue with Karsh. That would be cool. Then if it was successful we could’ve eventually had spin-offs like The Shrouds: Miami, The Shrouds: Special Interment Unit, etc.

But it’s not a show, it’s a movie, so as with all Cronenberg movies, I hope he licenses it for someone else to make direct-to-video THE SHROUDS II, THE SHROUDS III and SHROUD COP.