‘The Shrouds’ Review: David Cronenberg Makes a Movie About Grief — and Body Horror, and Digital Gravestones — That in Its Somber Way Verges on Self-Parody
variety.comOwen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “How dark do you want to go?” The man asking that is named Karsh (Vincent Cassel), and he’s seated in a minimalist art-chic restaurant having lunch with a blind date (though as she points out, how blind can a date be in the age of Google?).
The one who’s really asking the question, though, is David Cronenberg, writer-director of “The Shrouds.” He’s been asking that question — to audiences — for his entire career, and to him the answer has always been the same: The darker the better.
Yet Cronenberg has a special brand of dark. In “The Shrouds,” Karsh is a businessman who produces industrial videos, with a sleek Toronto apartment that looks out at the CN Tower, but he’s also a co-owner of the restaurant they’re sitting in, and the purveyor of what’s in the garden next to it: a cemetery where the gravestones are technological devices, and the corpses are draped in futuristic shrouds that allow you to peer into the coffin below and see how your dear departed loved one is…rotting.
Karsh’s wife, who died of cancer, is buried under one of those stones. Using the shroud-cam, he likes to stare, close up, at her corpse, and to imagine that he’s in the coffin along with her, snuggling.
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