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Yahoo
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'The Shrouds': David Cronenberg on how technology reflects 'the best part of us and the worst part of us'
Famed filmmaker David Cronenberg's newest film The Shrouds (now in theatres) has been marked as his most personal film work to date. Starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Sandrine Holt, Guy Pearce, Jennifer Dale and Elizabeth Saunders, the beginning of Cronenberg's process to craft the film came after the death of his wife, Carolyn Zeifman. The film's lead character Karsh (Vincent Cassel), with a striking resemblance to Cronenberg in The Shrouds, started a company called GraveTech, inventing technology to enable people to monitor the corpse of their dead loved ones. Karsh uses the technology to observe his late wife Becca (Diane Kruger). But when the GraveTech cemetery is vandalized and the system hacked, that's when the mystery begins, with Karsh seeking assistance from Becca's sister Terry (also played by Kruger), and Terry's ex Maury (Guy Pearce). Eventually we meet blind woman Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the wife of one of GraveTech's clients, and Soo-Min is managing the creation of a Budapest GraveTech cemetery, as her husband's death approaches. As Cronenberg explained, while The Shrouds began after his wife's death, through working on the film the work became more of a fictional venture. "As soon as you start to write, it becomes fiction, and suddenly you're not restricted by the reality of what happened to you," Cronenberg told Yahoo Canada during last year's Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). "You are now creating fictional characters and fictional situations, and it gives you some interesting distance." "The initial inspiration for it is still always there, but it becomes further and further from you. It's not really an attempt to capture the exact essence of the past or anything like that. ... And then for a writer, that's exciting, the creative element of it, of shaping a new story, inventing characters and so on. ... It's only when you're showing the film and you no longer have to control things and shape things that it has an emotional impact on you. Really it comes to life only then, when you're screening the film for other people." In terms of exploring of grief through paranoia and conspiracy element of the film, Cronenberg identified that much of those elements came from how people respond to loss. "I noticed over many, many years of various people, friends, family, who have suffered the loss of somebody close, that there is this sort of strange need to blame someone for something, whether they blame themselves or they're blaming the doctors, the treatment, the misdiagnosis, the accident that shouldn't have happened," Cronenberg said. "There seems to be a need to find meaning in it. You know, it's very difficult to accept that these things happen for no actual good reason." For Holt, she described working on The Shrouds as an appealing challenge, including navigating how to play a blind character. "I wasn't at first sure I was what they were looking for when I got the audition," Holt said. "But I sort of did my interpretation and David seemed to like it." Describing her collaboration with Cronenberg, she said it was a very "relaxed" atmosphere. "For me, personally, I sort of came in towards the end, and I don't live in Toronto, so I really just met him when I came in, and he's great," Holt said. "He just sort of lets you ... do your own thing, and if he has any notes, he gives them to you. But it's very relaxed. The atmosphere on set is very, very chill, very pleasant." "There wasn't any real rehearsal period, but ... you can feel that everybody's just really trying to make something meaningful. From the costume designer to the DP, every single person that's on that set is really bringing their best." While much of Cronenberg's work has looked at the power of technology and technological paranoia, with The Shrouds he continues to lean into the fact that human are technological beings. "For me, technology has always been an extension of what it is that makes us human, and so I always expect technology to reflect what we are, the best part of us and the worst part of us," Cronenberg said. "People talk about artificial intelligence, for example, I think it's the same thing. It will do horrible things, and it will do wonderful things, just the way humans do both of those things." In a separate interview, Holt also highlighted the interested intersection of technology and loneliness. "I was just thinking about how technology has affected our lives in every facet at this point, from dating to learning to to everything," she said. "Using technology to control the feeling of loss is kind of interesting. Like can technology ease grief or loneliness? ... I feel like technology sort of increases the feeling of loneliness."
USA Today
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Would you watch your loved ones decompose? 'The Shrouds' imagines a grave future
Would you watch your loved ones decompose? 'The Shrouds' imagines a grave future Show Caption Hide Caption A man clings to his dead wife in David Cronenberg's 'The Shrouds' Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger star in David Cronenberg's "The Shrouds," following a husband haunted by the memory of his late wife. David Cronenberg knows exactly how he wants to be buried. In his new movie 'The Shrouds' (in theaters nationwide April 25), the Canadian filmmaker imagines a near future where high-definition cameras are placed in luxury coffins, allowing people to check in on their loved ones via livestream after they die. It may sound macabre, watching your family and friends as their bodies gradually decay through the years. But if such technology actually existed, Cronenberg would be all in. 'I would have done that, I really would,' he says on a Zoom call. 'In Toronto, we have a walk of fame with plaques in the sidewalk. I thought, 'I would like to be buried under my plaque.' In fact, it should have Plexiglass so people could look down and see me there disintegrating. I know my fans would love that.' Join our Watch Party! Sign up to receive USA TODAY's movie and TV recommendations right in your inbox 'The Shrouds' movie tells a 'very personal' story about grief 'The Shrouds' follows an anguished entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel), who starts a casket surveillance company known as GraveTech following the death of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). But after her cemetery plot is vandalized one night, along with many others, Karsh sets out to catch the culprits and uncover the secrets of Becca's past. The film is extremely meaningful to Cronenberg, 82, the body-horror maestro behind 'Scanners,' 'Videodrome' and 'The Fly.' In 2017, he lost his frequent collaborator and wife of 38 years, Carolyn Zeifman, to cancer. She was 66. 'I made a lot of notes throughout the two years I was taking care of my wife,' Cronenberg says. Writing this movie, 'I just had to remind myself what I was thinking and feeling.' In an early scene, Karsh explains to a blind date (Jennifer Dale) why he invented GraveTech. Watching as Becca was lowered into the ground, he felt an intense urge to hop in there with her. ('I couldn't stand it that she was alone in there, and that I would never know what was happening to her,' Karsh says.) That sentiment is drawn from Cronenberg's own grieving experience. 'I might not have jumped, but I would have been in there,' Cronenberg says. 'Those were feelings that really surprised me; I didn't anticipate them, but they hit me very hard. Without really being conscious of it, I always thought I was her protector. When she died, I realized how vulnerable I was to the world and that she had been protecting me all that time.' Kruger plays three characters in the movie, including Becca's consoling twin sister, Terry, and Karsh's A.I. assistant bot, Hunny. Reading the script, 'there seemed to be this enduring love story in the film that was very emotional and touched me profoundly,' the German actress says. Meeting him afterward, "David was very generous in sharing a lot of stories and inspirations for these characters. It made it very personal.' 'Shrouds' helped Kruger to understand the physical torment of losing your soulmate. She wonders how it must have felt for her grandfather, who was married to her grandmother for 70 years before she died. 'The pain of continuing to exist, and not having her body, has new meaning to me,' Kruger, 48, says. 'It's uncomfortable and sad to think about death: the fear of really being gone and not seeing that person again. It's not something I particularly look forward to.' 'Shrouds' director David Cronenberg reflects on his own mortality, legacy Cronenberg, who is atheist, has long-explored mortality and the unhappy realities of the human body, most recently in his 2022 sci-fi drama 'Crimes of the Future.' British writer Christopher Hitchens once said that 'death causes religion,' and 'I think that's the truth,' Cronenberg says. 'People can't face it. It's very powerful for us to imagine not existing, and so to avoid imagining our own oblivion, we make up stories that say you will not really disappear; that you'll be in heaven or get reincarnated.' But ultimately, life is about 'accepting the beauty and absurdity of existence. It's that very beauty that makes it so painful to imagine leaving it.' Cronenberg has worked steadily for six decades, directing Oscar-nominated films such as 'Eastern Promises' and 'A History of Violence,' although he himself has never been nominated. The unassuming filmmaker downplays his Hollywood impact, but speaks highly of horror provocateurs Coralie Fargeat ('The Substance') and Julia Ducournau ('Titane'), both of whom have cited him as a major influence. 'They're really talented and it's very sweet. They're like my cinematic daughters,' Cronenberg says. 'The fact that I've inspired younger filmmakers is lovely, but it doesn't pay the bills.' He also has little patience for directors like Quentin Tarantino, who has proclaimed for years that he plans to retire after his 10th and final movie, as a career 'mic drop.' 'Who cares? The people who like his films won't remember which order they were in,' Cronenberg says with a shrug. 'Frankly, you're kidding yourself if you think you're in control of your legacy. You aren't."
Boston Globe
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
In ‘The Shrouds,' David Cronenberg interrogates grief within a paranoid thriller
From 'Rabid' (1977) to 'The Fly' (1986) to 'Crimes of the Future' (2022), has any filmmaker been as interested in bodily functions and decay? So a shroud cam fits right in with his aesthetic: imaginative, transgressive, clinical, with a high IQ (that's IQ as in 'ick quotient'). But there's also an autobiographical element to 'The Shrouds.' Cronenberg's wife, Carolyn Zeifman, died in 2017, and the writer-director has acknowledged the disabling sense of loss he felt. This is a movie about grief that is itself born of grief. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Hunny the AI avatar and a "shroud," in "The Shrouds." Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films Advertisement Underscoring that personal element is 'I had an intense, visceral urge to get in the box with her,' Karsh says of Becca. He developed the shroud cam and founded a company to promote it, GraveTech. Advertisement Becca appears in dreams (or are they?). She's played by Diane Kruger, who also plays her younger sister, Terry, and provides the voice of Karsh's flirtatious AI personal assistant, Hunny. It's a triple play that recalls Jeremy Irons's tour de force as twin brothers, in Cronenberg's 'Dead Ringers' (1988). Terry accuses Karsh, who envisions a global network of GraveTech cemeteries, of being a 'a corpse voyeur, making a career out of it.' He says she's 'catastrophically neurotic.' Ah, in-laws. Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger in "The Shrouds." Sophie Giraud When several of the high-tech graves are vandalized, Karsh seeks help from Terry's ex-husband, Maury. He's played by a barely recognizable Guy Pearce. Maury's techno-geek schlubbiness is a long way from Pearce's big-bucks architecture patron in ' What had been a meditation on mortality, love, and grief starts to take on aspects of a paranoid thriller. Is that a tracking device in Becca's remains? Why has the doctor who was her oncologist disappeared? Might GraveTech hardware have the potential to form a clandestine surveillance network? A cerebral narrative, oblique yet affecting, now gets to be a bit much. Vincent Cassel and Sandrine Holt in "The Shrouds." Courtesy of Sideshow and Janus Films The pace feels deliberate throughout, almost at times ceremonial. Karsh describes himself as 'a non-observant atheist.' 'The Shrouds' is a bit like that, too. It can seem vaguely religious yet minus any religiosity. 'Non-observant atheist' is also a pretty funny line. There are others. Cronenberg's sense of humor more be more -- a lot more -- 'hmm' than 'ha ha,' but he definitely has one. When concerns about GraveTech security arise, Karsh offers reassurance. 'Of course, everything's encrypted. Pun intended.' Or there's the movie's opening exchange, with Karsh visiting his dentist. Advertisement Dentist: 'Grief is rotting your teeth.' Karsh: 'Is this medically feasible?' Dentist: 'Teeth register emotion.' Karsh: 'So what do I do about the grief thing, dentally speaking?' It's hard to say which is more Cronenbergian: the concept of teeth registering emotion or a term like 'the grief thing.' What Cronenberg has done about the grief thing, cinematically speaking, is 'The Shrouds.' A few scenes after the dental exam, Karsh goes on a blind date. The woman he's with asks him to describe how he's handled mourning. 'How dark are you willing to go?' Karsh replies. 'I'm okay with dark,' she says. Well, there's dark and then there's dark. As Irons famously says in the (non-Cronenberg-directed) 'Reversal of Fortune' (1990), *** THE SHROUDS Written and directed by David Cronenberg. Starring Vincent Kassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce. Sandrine Holt. At Boston Common, Coolidge Corner, 119 minutes. R (nudity; decompositional and medical ick, albeit fairly tame by Cronenberg standards) Mark Feeney can be reached at
New York Times
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Shrouds' Review: For Cronenberg, Grief Is an Obsession
In David Cronenberg's latest film, 'The Shrouds,' the lines between life and death, emotion and pathology, biology and technology, become blurred. Even the movie's tone lands in a liminal space where gravitas slips into comedy — I couldn't help but snicker when someone tells the main character, 'Karsh, don't crash!' A dry macabre humor has long run through Cronenberg's work, and the uncertainty behind some of his intentions here creates thought-provoking ambiguity. Since an important source of inspiration was the death of Cronenberg's wife from cancer, in 2017, are we really supposed to find this funny? I would argue, yes — among other details in keeping with the Canadian director's approach, a woman is revealed to find conspiracy theories sexually arousing — but there is still enough doubt to mess with viewers' heads. The aforementioned Karsh (an understated Vincent Cassel, in his third Cronenberg movie after 'A Dangerous Method' and the terrific 'Eastern Promises') is a Tesla-driving Toronto entrepreneur. His business, GraveTech, involves burying the dead in shrouds that transmit images to screen-embedded headstones. At his cemetery, you can, in effect, watch a livestream of a decomposing body. (This is not so far-fetched, considering recent developments in both wearable technology and invasive voyeurism.) Karsh is personally invested in this corpse cam because his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), died of cancer four years earlier. She is buried in one of his shrouds, and he can check on her decay's progress. This we all learn in a surreal introductory scene in which Karsh explains GraveTech to a lunch date, Myrna (Jennifer Dale), at a restaurant overlooking his wired-up cemetery. He even shows her Becca's feed, which might not beat brandy as a digestif. Before long the plot properly kicks into gear. Thanks to his technology's high resolution, Karsh notices odd growths on Becca's corpse. They don't look organic, so then what are they? Who put them there? Shortly thereafter, the graves are vandalized. Again: Who? Why? With each new plot development, the movie lurches in a different direction before then abandoning it. 'The Shrouds' is about a disturbing new gizmo. No, it's about grief, a force as mighty as it is paralyzing. Wait, it's about surveillance and espionage, and could involve Russia or China. Or maybe it is about fixating not so much on the dead as on death itself, and the need to accept it. A hint perhaps: In 2021, Cronenberg, with his daughter, directed a minute-long film, 'The Death of David Cronenberg,' in which he kisses then hugs his own corpse. Amid scenes that are plain baffling (we expect those from Cronenberg), there are plot switchbacks and red herrings that don't add up. Still, the movie keeps returning to reality and fantasy, fetishism and desire, and the moment when love becomes obsession becomes stalking. That last progression, in particular, feels like an inevitability in the world Karsh inhabits. Many of those themes are common in Cronenberg's movies, and if anything, 'The Shrouds' is almost conventional compared with its perversely erotic predecessor, 'Crimes of the Future' (2022). Karsh's relationships with women follow a pattern; he seems to experience them solely as his wife's proxies. As in Hitchcock's 'Vertigo,' romantic fixation is a necrophiliac fever dream. Those women include Becca's look-alike sister Terry (Kruger), a vet turned dog groomer with whom he has a push-pull connection; and the blind Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), a prospective client's wife. The scariest of all is an avatar: Karsh's artificial-intelligence assistant, Hunny (Kruger, again), a creepily perky glorified emoji who knows all, controls all, and might be even more invasive than the Russian secret service. It makes sense, then, that the key counterpoint to our lead is Terry's ex-husband, Maury (Guy Pearce, in yet another memorable supporting turn). An old-fashioned hacker who clickety-clacks away on his computer, Maury is as greasy and rumpled as Karsh is glossy and smooth. They feel like two sides of one coin, though. 'The Shrouds' is overstuffed and often clunky, but if there is a takeaway, it's that some men engage with technology to disengage with reality. And that is more unsettling than any body horror.
