The Shrouds

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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The foremost Surrealist David Cronenberg (“The Fly”) returns with “The Shrouds.” It is stark, eerie, opaque, and oddly compelling. Curiously it feels like a clinical version of Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” True to Cronenberg form, the sparse landscapes are formidable, and the dialogue is stilted. Once again, the auteur employs his saturnine visual style, a medical chiaroscuro, to a fine point.

Karsh (Vincent Cassel) is a melancholy CEO dealing with the death of his wife from cancer. He is a restaurateur with a bistro in the heart of a cemetery. Each grave contains an iPad screen to view the corpses decaying under the soil. The graves are gunmetal grey and polished to a gleaming shine. Each night, after attending to business and meditating, Karsh returns to his monastic compound, designed with intent and purpose in Zen minimalism. Despite a colorful Koi pond, it resembles a Castle Dracula, dark and forbidding.

Karsh’s futon, as enclosed and as fragile as an embryo, holds the morose man in a fixed position: a forlorn fetus. He dreams of his wife Becca, (Diane Kruger) half formed and scarred by the war that is surgery. Sometimes she is missing an arm or a breast. Her gait is slinky seductive and dangerous, Becca is a Frankenstein mistress of shadows. By day, Karsh is left in a daze, and the sun contains no resolutions or answers.

One day on errands, Karsh is alerted by his tech man and programmer Maury (Guy Pearce) that the cemetery has been vandalized. He also discovers on video that his wife’s body is speckled with strange pebble-like polyps of irregular shape.

Karsh, craving absolute control, is tormented and feels he is being taken advantage of by unknown forces.

The businessman has a virtual avatar girlfriend named Terry to whom he confides his innermost secrets. Karsh receives the impression from dreams that Becca was cheating on him with her surgeon, while associates tell him that his AI girlfriend is a spy or worse, a creation of malware (digital blackmail).

Karsh goes into a rage.

Every predicament makes the businessman more and more uncomprehending and speechless. The episodes turn and twist upon each other, creating a cinematic Ouroboros.

Karsh’s inquiries only lead to more serpentine questions, catty ripostes from his sister-in law (Diane Kruger in a double role), or dispassionate explanations.

Like Karsh, the audience is left floating between worlds: one of green leaves and dirt and the other of plastic screens and white light. Karsh panics when faced with Nature. He cringes at a smashed screen cast aside in graveyard dirt and later he loses his footing in the woods and turns white with fear.

Karsh’s only defense against Nature is a black samurai shroud for his graveyard residents, Ninja-like and impenetrable. The combat against decay is a war against nature, occultly manic and obsessive.

Central to the film are the sharp angled landscapes, the geometric spaces that Karsh inhabits, including the circular futon that mimics a womb or a sorrowful sun, yellow ochre, burned and tattered at the edges.

The entrance of Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt) into Karsh’s life is one of darkness, sexuality, and morbidity. A singular sex scene is composed as a Quantum Vanitas painting. Lust transforms Karsh into a cadaverous infant, both alive and dead at the same time. And the attack of conspiracy leads to orgasmic arousal.

Soo-Min is a literal symbol of blind Love but also Persephone and Leucothea— a laconic and deliberate goddess of release.

Cronenberg’s final flourish remains a simple metallic plane, gleaming and far away, a dispassionate star.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com