David Cronenberg has always been far ahead of most of his peers. Crafting mind-bending films that question everything we innocently assume to be stable and real, Cronenberg has throughout his career been the great destabilizer. Exploring questions of identity, the physical body, and the oftentimes harsh and unsettling realities of our existence in this unstable and shadowy life we find ourselves born into. Having had such a long career directing, I feel like his films could be referred to in four eras. We find his two newest films to be a sort of revitalization of his artistic voice, Crimes of the Future and The Shrouds. I would say that the films of his first period, which looked and presented themselves as grindhouse shockers, subverted the audience by smuggling in quite radical and transgressive ideas, in films like Rabid and Shivers. Then he had his most lauded phase, his masterworks phase. He finally had budgets and attention from critics to allow him to make films with a more free hand. In this era, he created such films as Videodrome and Crash. Then in his third era, there is a kind of feeling of a director unsure where to go with his work. A sort of era of experiments in genres outside his previous work in the horror and science fiction fields. Here we find thrillers and character dramas. There was a feeling of loss of vision, a sense of uncertainty found its way into his films here. This period may be his least creatively satisfying. Films like Cosmopolis and Maps of the Stars are in this era. Then we had years of silence from Cronenberg. At least until, excitingly, we had the announcement of a new Cronenberg horror film, Crimes of the Future. In what was hopefully a return to form. Crimes of the Future, while delving into some interesting ideas, just lacked the bite and the sharpness of Cronenberg’s best work. A rather dull affair that never really challenged the audience. In this era, what we may call the fourth era of Cronenberg, we find ourselves with his new film, the semi-autobiographical abstract nightmare The Shrouds.
After the minor letdown of Crimes of the Future, tempered expectations met the announcement of a new horror film from Cronenberg. But even with the disappointment of his previous film, a new Cronenberg film, no matter what, is a very exciting event, his reputation based on the absolute masterpieces that he has gifted us. The Shrouds is a film that is in part based on Cronenberg’s loss of his wife to cancer. A tragic loss that devastated him. She was not only his wife, she was a collaborator on his films, having served as an editor on a couple of his early films. The Shrouds is also a film that is an examination of the feeling of paranoia in our culture, a fog of online conspiracy theories, and a feeling that our lives have been derailed by technology. If technology gives us everything we feel we want, then why do we still feel empty, alienated from life? There are all these forces seeking control over our lives, through social media, manipulation of the news, manipulation of the stock markets and the economy, attempts to dictate and subvert our feelings on human rights and individual freedoms. All being conducted by shadowy forces that we can’t even be sure are real. An era of artificial intelligence and mass propaganda campaigns.
The main character, Karsh, is some kind of vague technological mastermind behind a new innovation: cemeteries where one can monitor the decay of their loved ones while they lie in their tombs. This is a film of data breaches and breaches into our dreams. There is this insane haze of possible subversion of the cemeteries by what may be Chinese interests, using the graves and the dead bodies as a means of mass foreign surveillance. This paranoid idea is both crazy and perfectly relatable to anyone who has checked the news or logged on to social media in the past ten years. Cronenberg weaves all these feelings and concerns together, and has created this masterpiece of alienated grief and paranoia of unseen powers. He takes all these feelings of grief and loss and perverts them, twists them into something new and strange. There is this focus on the body, the body of his dead wife, the body of his lovers, the body rotting in the ground. What kind of person inhibits the body seems to be mutable. In our culture, are we but eager insects going after sensation and transgression? You can view the open body of your deceased lovers and relatives. Their bodies lay open to view. Is this a comment on the emptiness of our bodies, or ourselves?
But in form and in feeling, The Shrouds is a nightmare. It seems to have almost been dredged from the darkest and most murky parts of Cronenberg's subconscious. Both personal and abstract, The Shrouds is both a personal nightmare of loss and a paranoid vision of our culture. It is like Cronenberg put directly onto the screen the nightmares he had after the death of his wife. This is a very personal work, but don't make the mistake of thinking it’s completely autobiographical. This is private hurt perverted by nightmare logic. A haze of unreality hovers over the film. Paranoia and sexual desire are the main currents running through the narrative. Daytime logic is not needed for a nightmare to feel real. It all feels real in the way a nightmare makes total sense while you are trapped in it. Surgically deformed bodies, strange skeletal growths, technologically fueled perversions, The Shrouds is a fever dream of sick desire and alienated grief.
Almost wonderfully unexpected, The Shrouds is a masterpiece from one of our most vital voices. In an era of sterility and Hollywood formalization infecting horror cinema, The Shrouds asks us to examine our ever increasingly fragile connections with our bodies and our interconnections with each other filtered through technology. Unsettling yet erotic, paranoid yet dreamy, The Shrouds brings Cronenberg to the modern era to help light the way through what most of us would consider to be confusing times. Where does The Shrouds stand inside Cronenberg’s oeuvre? I honestly feel it stands with his best work. The top tier of Cronenberg films, I would say, are Videodrome, Crash, Dead Ringers, and The Shrouds. Cronenberg combines personal nightmare and social commentary like no other filmmaker. And The Shrouds is a testament to how needed his vision is.
