The Shrouds

Ein Industriefilmer verarbeitet den Tod seiner Frau in einer Beziehung mit deren Zwillingsschwester (Doppelrolle: Diane Kruger), einem KI-Avatar (Kruger, light) und einem makabren Friedhofsprojekt: Digitale Leichentücher erlauben den Trauernden hier, sich jederzeit durch die verwesenden Leichname zu scannen. Übermütig und dialogfreudig kreuzt Cronenberg in THE SHROUDS paranoides Melodram mit chirurgischen Alpträumen – und lässt mit makabrem Humor alle Erzählfäden freidrehen, während er außerdem seine 2017 verstorbene Frau Carolyn betrauert. Pilotfilm eines bislang nicht fortgesetzten Serienprojektes. (Robert Weixlbaumer) 

“Tell me about this body thing,” says one of the characters in THE SHROUDS to the film’s protagonist Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a widower pummelled by grief and the owner of GraveTech, a company that supplies the living with a direct video link to the corpses of their dearly departed as they rot in the ground. Like no other director, David Cronenberg has been telling us about “this body thing” for some fifty years now. In films that plunge into the squish and ick of the flesh, he draws close to where soft meat meets the hard gleam of technology. THE SHROUDS extends this obsession with aplomb, mingling piercing insight with humour in its depiction of a Toronto replete with sex and death, paranoia and sabotage, flirty AI assistants and chilling “shroud-cams”. The geopolitics of cybersecurity lurk in the background of it all, but the kind of connectivity with which THE SHROUDS is most concerned has little to do with fibre-optic networks. This is a film about the human need for love and touch in the face of finitude, one in which the pleasures of genre are inseparable from philosophical weight. (Erika Balsom)

David Cronenberg: CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (1970), SHIVERS (1975), RABID (1977), THE BROOD (1979), SCANNERS (1980), VIDEODROME (1983), THE DEAD ZONE (1983), THE FLY (1986), DEAD RINGERS (1988), NAKED LUNCH (1991), M. BUTTERFLY (1993), CRASH (1996), EXISTENZ (1999), SPIDER (2002), A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005), EASTERN PROMISES (2007), A DANGEROUS METHOD (2011), COSMOPOLIS (2012), MAPS TO THE STARS (2014), CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022)