The Shrouds
SPOILERS! 2024's THE SHROUDS is a far from perfect offering from writer/director David Cronenberg, but I'm glad he remains able to continue to realize his bold, personal vision. Even in his early eighties. Damned impressive, and the film retains his well known trademarks. The clinical dissertations. Mordant humor. Sexual predilections. And yes, some awkward dialogue. As Cronenberg's wife had passed several years earlier, I expected this film to play as a somber meditation on death; in its best moments, it succeeds to that end. Karsh (Vincent Cassel), whose wife Becca (Diane Kruger) succumbed to cancer four years before, has developed a unusual service for the bereaved - live three dimensional images of the deceased's corpse in its casket. Created by a high tech shroud. "GraveTech" has a monitor on the tombstone (and a smartphone app, of course) on which to view these images. Karsh is obsessed with watching his wife's decomposition and has recurr...
