THE SHROUDS – a film by David Cronenberg – (SPOILERS) ⁓

The Shrouds is a study in obsession and possessiveness. It is thematically similar to Lenore, and Annabel Lee, and just the sort of macabre tale Edgar Allen Poe might write were he alive today.

Karsh Relikh (Vincenet Cassel), a widower whose wife Becca died of cancer six years ago, has designed a burial shroud that makes the decomposition of the corpse it contains visible to mourners with high-res zoom and virtual 3D rotation. It’s described as an enveloping camera that works like an x-ray or CT scan, and takes the form of an embracing wrapper, like what they used to call a winding sheet.

The Blind Date

Karsh has a blind date with Myrna Shovlin (Jennifer Dale), a woman who has been divorced for twenty years and is still living in the house designed by her architect ex-husband. They have lunch at the restaurant at Karsh’s prototype cemetery, and when he explains his invention, Myrna suggests that the Shroud of Turin predated his shroud by about 2000 years. “Maybe 700,” Karsh responds, explaining that the Turin Shroud is almost certainly a fake, and his are not. Then she asks if his wife was okay with ‘this cemetery business’.

KARSH: “How dark are you willing to go?”
MYRNA: “I’m okay with dark.”
KARSH: “When they lowered my dead wife into the ground in her coffin, I had an intense, visceral urge to get into the box with her. It was so strong. I couldn’t stand it that she was alone in there and that I would never know what was happening to her. It wasn’t a literary or intellectual thing. It was right here, pulling me hard.“

He further explains that cremation was not an option because wife was Jewish. Karsh describes himself as a non-observant atheist, raised according to “some Belarusian Eastern Orthodox thing”. He was born “over there somewhere”.

Myrna gets a tour of the cemetery and a look at Becca’s remains via the video screen on her tombstone. She is politely aghast at the whole experience, and asks if it’s okay to smoke.

idée fixe

Myrna leaves, never to return, and Karsh visits his sister-in-law Terry (Diane Kruger), a veterinarian turned dog groomer. Terry is into conspiracy theories, and has long believed that doctors used her late sister to test experimental cancer treatment methods. (Terry and Becca are not twins, but they “have the same body”. Kruger portrays both sisters in the film. She also voices Karsh’s AI personal assistant Hunny, who is modeled after Becca.)

Karsh shows Terry images of strange white growths on Becca’s bones, something he only recently observed, and asks her opinion. “My money’s on tracking devices,” she says, “created deliberately while she was still alive, using her body as a manufacturing plant.” Karsh wonders why anyone would do that.

TERRY: “Well, you tell me. It’s obvious they were tracking you through her — her body. So I guess you could do two things. Could dig her up and have a look. That’d be fun, right? Say hello? Dig up the other corpses you’ve wrapped up. See if their Christmas paper produced any anomalies?”
KARSH: “Terry, why would anyone want to track me?”
TERRY: “Sure, right. You used to be the producer of industrial videos. Look, Becca said things. [Karsh stares at her, and she retreats.] She just made it up. Playful, you know. I forget what she said, Karsh, really I do.”

The cemetery’s maintenance person Grey Foner (Elizabeth Saunders) calls and tells him several graves have been vandalized, and sends him video of the damage. Only nine graves are affected, but the monitoring system was hacked and no one can get back in. Karsh calls his friend Maury Entrekin (Guy Pearce) in an effort to regain access.

Entrekin designed the GraveTech system. He also designed Hunny, and is Terry’s ex-husband. Maury is surprised at Karsh’s Japanese-style condo renovations and hurt that recent modifications to GraveTech‘s systems were done by someone else. Maury’s biggest worry is that Karsh might have slept with his ex-wife Terry. Karsh explains that when Becca was near death, she told him specifically: “Stay away from my sister.” Whether she said that to protect her sister, or to protect Karsh from her sister, is unknown.

Fight or Flight

Karsh asks Hunny to make him an appointment with Becca’s oncologist, and Hunny reports that Dr. Eckler has gone missing after going to a conference in Reykjavik. It may or may not be a co-incidence that Iceland is one of the places where GraveTech is planning a new cemetery. Eckler dated Becca when she was in university, so he had Becca’s body first, and had access to it later as her doctor when she was dying, and Karsh is jealous of that. He contacts radiologist Dr. Rory Zhao (Jeff Yung) who determines the things on Becca’s bones to be animated constructs of a very complex nature, created with unknown purpose.

The hackers who attacked the GraveTech website decorated their work with Icelandic runes, so Karsh contacts an Icelandic eco-activist named Elvan (Ingvar Sigurdsson), whom he believes might be responsible. When Karsh calls, Elvan is walking in a graveyard full of neatly arranged burial mounds he says is about 700 years old. (Carbon-dating indicates that The Shroud of Turin, mentioned earlier by Myrna, originated around that time.) Though Elvan does not approve of GraveTech, he says that no one on the island attacked Karsh’s cemetery.

Karsh meets with Soo-Min Szabo (Sandrine Holt), who is blind and has a guide dog named Trill. Her Hungarian husband Karoly (Vieslav Krystyan) has made a fortune in EV technology. Karoly is dying, and wants to finance a cemetery in Budapest, but is concerned that the GraveTech system could be used “as an integral part of an electronic surveillance mesh network controlled by Russia’s GRU.” Soo-min wonders if Karsh’s system could be made accessible to blind people, and Karsh is optimistic about that.

Maury admits to hiring a couple of Russian hackers to trash the cemetery, and then descends into cold-war-style paranoia about Russian and Chinese spies. (GraveTech‘s shrouds were manufactured by a Chinese based company called Shining Cloth Technologies, and because Dr. Zhao is Chinese, Maury connects the two and builds a conspiracy with the connection.) He says Chinese agents tortured him because he hired Russian hackers and they thought he was working for the Russians, and shows Karsh a couple of severed fingers to back up his claims, but Terry later says that Maury lost those fingers in a high school shop accident. Either Maury or Terry is lying.

It becomes necessary to dig up Becca’s body along with seven others. Workers not wearing masks lift the shrouded bodies from their shallow graves and put them on stretchers for transport. The ending of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” comes to mind and one wonders why there is no trace of decomposed skin, muscle, and organs.

Once the cemetery is repaired, Karsh discovers that someone has been buried in the plot next to Becca — the plot reserved for him. The video screen shows that Dr. Eckler is buried there, and he has been shot in the head. Karsh and Terry develop conspiracy theories, but Karsh himself comes up with the most interesting one. “I paid to have Eckler killed,” he speculates, “and had him buried here myself…because she betrayed me with him and I don’t want her anymore.” No one checks to see if Eckler’s really buried there.

Soo-min arranges to meet Karsh at a hotel, and they begin an affair, which leads to Karsh and Soo-Min running off to Hungary. They drive to Soo-min’s private plane in her Rolls, and when he sees the plane, Karsh asks: “You sure this thing can make it all the way to Budapest?” Soo-Min is reassuring. “Karoly and I have made this flight many times,” she says. “You make one stop at Rekyjavik. It’s very nice.”

SOO-MIN: “All your friends will come and visit you when you are buried at GraveTech Budapest.”
KARSH: “My friends don’t all have private planes.”
SOO-MIN: “Well, I’ll get you some new friends that do. You’re going to love Budapest. It won’t surprise me if you eventually decided to live there. I have a beautiful big house.”

Toronto to Rekjavik is abut 4200 kilometers, and one does wonder if that little jet will make it that far.

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Nick Newman of The Film Stage asked Cronenberg why The Shrouds, which began as a Netflix series, leaves so many dangling threads. “As I recall,” Cronenberg replied, “the first episode that I wrote has him flying to Iceland. And the second episode takes place in Iceland. And after that, it was going to be Budapest, but we never got around to that. So that shifted. And then some of what would have been in Iceland is now on his phone with the Icelandic guy that he talks to. Most of my movies are somewhat open-ended…there’s the sense that these characters live beyond the movie — that they have a life beyond the movie, that they’re still out there somewhere. Karsh, I don’t know where he is; he might be in China by now.”

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The Shrouds can be purchased from Amazon Prime Video or from Apple TV. It will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on 21 October.