02-07-2025
The Shrouds review — a sex scene so pompous it made me howl
David Cronenberg certainly can't be accused of playing it safe in his ninth decade. The new film from the 82-year-old Canadian body-horror maestro (The Fly, Crash) stars Vincent Cassel as Karsh, the owner of GraveTech, a Toronto company that lets you watch your dead loved ones decay via in-coffin CCTV that sends images to a screen on the tombstone.
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Karsh is doing just that with his departed wife, Becca, portrayed in dream sequences by Diane Kruger, who also plays Becca's sister, Terry, and voices Karsh's flirtatious AI assistant. Guy Pearce looks faintly embarrassed as Terry's ex-husband, Maury, a sweaty conspiracy theorist.
The idea of digitising grief is intriguing but Cronenberg drives it into what can only be termed a dead end. After the Noughties revival of Eastern Promises and A History of Violence, recent films such as Maps to the Stars have been more dubious, and this one, which premiered last year at the Cannes Film Festival, also leaves a strange taste in the mouth.
It's full of gorgeous rich people, handsome interiors, narrative red herrings and half-hearted paranoia about artificial intelligence, biotech unscrupulousness and Chinese corporate espionage.
Yet you worry that its main purpose is to put Cassel's hilariously self-satisfied Karsh into bed with as many naked women as possible and get poor Kruger to say things like, 'You'd better f*** me, quick.' One of their sex scenes together, with him commentating pompously throughout, is a mini-masterpiece of unintentional hilarity.★★☆☆☆15, 120minIn cinemas
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