In the Flesh: The Shrouds

“How dark are you willing to go?” aging businessman Karsh (Vincent Cassel) asks his date in the opening scene of The Shrouds. “Not terribly” appears to be the film’s answer. From its flat outdoor digital photography to its heavy reliance on various shades of terrible CGI, the whole production — originally intended as a limited series for Netflix — feels lifeless. It’s appropriate, given the themes Cronenberg is playing with, and I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and say he’s making a series of intentional stylistic choices, bending the film’s visual arc toward sterility, artificiality, and uncanny inhumanity. The result, however, is a film that feels like a commercial, even when it’s not hawking Tesla. If the price of thematic unity in visual, dramatic, and written elements is making a film so stiff and desolate it barely feels like Cronenberg’s work at all, perhaps another avenue of approach might have served the director better.

Less charitably, one might say that Cronenberg’s increasing reliance on high-tech filmmaking has left his work impersonal and uninspired, that his career-long fascination with alienation from the human body and psyche has finally — in concert with this turn away from practical effects and makeup — led him to a place of total visual weightlessness. One might say that his obsession with analyzing and exploring the 2017 death of his wife, Carolyn, has paradoxically taken his work further from the very emotions and phenomena he’s trying to explore. Is he aware that as his characters speak of impossible intimacy with the dead bodies of their loved ones, facilitated by technology they cling to as a proxy for real connection, his film shows us images so bland it feels difficult to focus on them? Is he exploring the dissonance between execution and idea, or has he simply created something… bad?

There are pleasures to be had here, to be sure. Cronenberg’s interior shots are much better than his exteriors, dark and moody and steeped in shadows like spreading tea stains. Howard Shore does serviceable work with his cold, minimal soundtrack, and Vincent Cassel is as gorgeously weathered as the battlement of some Gothic castle, opposite the absurdly beautiful Sandrine Holt, whose character’s blindness is effectively juxtaposed against the deep sensory hunger afflicting Cassel’s. Cassel standing wrapped in one of the titular shrouds in a darkened room as his “AI” assistant bobbles happily on a nearby screen is deeply disturbing. But frankly, I expect more from Cronenberg than a few scattered images and a single genuinely frightening sex scene. To have what amounts to a Tesla commercial piled on top of an already flat experience is almost beyond endurance.