A few days ago, I made the requisite pilgrimage over to an oddly timed matinee to see David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds. To see a Cronenberg film in the theaters is increasingly to invite an unusual experience, and in this case the nearest AMC was one largely unconverted from the old theater seats; all shallow rows with the faces of your fellow audience members all too visible when you step in. My fellow passengers were 5 other single riders, each bringing their own specific thing to the crowd. A young man with his water bottle, reading a book. A woman with her headphones on, a smuggled in coffee in the cupholder. A dude who would surely tell you how much he loves Videodrome, with his Metallica hoodie hanging over baggy cargo jeans. And two other youngish women who crept in looking studious. I found my place among them, sitting down to immediately pull out my notebook and scribble away.
If we weren’t all film scholars – in one way or the other – we were, at least, all there with the mutually agreed upon understanding e we had no interest in watching this film with other people. Maybe it’s the Cronenberg fact of it all, or maybe it was the knowledge of its themes: grief-heavy, death-obsessed in, perhaps, a way different than some of his previous work. These things are not, many would probably agree, the making of a chill hang.
I don’t want to write a traditional review of The Shrouds, and I don’t know particularly what I want to say about it at all just yet, but I got caught up with its first line – “grief is rotting your teeth.” This is a film that – just before this line – opens with a dream/nightmare sequence in which Vincent Cassel (in Cronenberg drag) sobs while looking at the decaying corpse of his wife through an open panel in a fleshy room. The Shrouds is obsessed with rot, and its title refers to the sci-fi wrappings produced by Cassel’s character’s burial technology company: ghostly, funereal structures capturing a live feed of the body resting within so their loved ones can fire up an app and watch the decomposition in real time.
“Grief is rotting your teeth” was – to me, in the dark of the theater – a kind of striking way to open what is ultimately a very flawed, but curiously engaging film. I think it’s the specificity of it, the way Cassel’s mourning is so unbound he drifts off to observe it while at the dentist. The way the dentist’s line suggests that – dream sequences aside – we’ll never see the full impact of the emotional upset on screen. It’s internal, intrinsic, and permeates everything in a way that’s just fucking weird.
I’m thinking about this too much, probably, and with no cohesion, but the odd slant of the line is an example of what works in The Shrouds: the specificity of its off-kilter details: koala-transforming avatars, a dog grooming sister-in-law, tracking collars and an over-the-top Japanese design influence and a classy restaurant in a cemetery and discussion of ‘friendly’ breasts or a repeat paranoid mention of Iceland. The structural integrity of our protagonist’s world is unsound from the very start, and as the film morphs into a type of cyber surveillance thriller, it’s like, well, yeah, sure, in grief, everything collapses under its own weight.
love + squalor 