TEXTILES.ORG
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might be the right word?
Chronology
Karsh, an innovative entrepreneur and grieving widow, builds a device to connect with the dead in a burial shroud. IMDb editor Arno Kazarian offers a quick rundown of the 12 films he screened at the 2024 New York Film Festival, including Anora and the dangerous, oddly erotic Misericordia. Diane Kruger stars as Leah Seydoux. Movie Junk Podcast Link: Episode 961: Violent in Nature + TIFF 2024 (2024). Compared to the very mediocre Future Crimes, Cronenberg’s previous effort and a return to the body horror subgenre that made him famous, "The Shrouds" some kind of comeback…
I invite you to care about the answers to the many mysteries at the heart of The Shrouds
But, as in that previous film, "Landenes" you’re probably thinking of another similar Cronenberg film that may have done better. Above all, you can think of the horrifying “Crash,” which dealt with similar themes of macabre voyeurism and sexual fascination with death, bodily corruption, and wounds in a far more memorable way. It’s the curse of older, seasoned filmmakers to constantly compare their latest offering to their previous masterpieces, but it’s also inevitable that said filmmakers have so clearly run out of new ideas. The fact that the story, which is much more developed than “Future Crimes”, literally goes nowhere, is not that big of a problem – it’s just a side effect of playing with more basic themes. But it’s still hard to track down our rather bland hero with an investigation that grows duller by the minute.
Not that he expected answers
What matters is the psyche of our main character, which is made clear by the opening scene (and I think the very last one, which had some of the packed audience laughing, rather spectacularly dropping the story in the middle of nowhere). These two scenes really make you think that the story is actually about processing grief over the death of a loved one, which makes sense since Cronenberg used his wife’s death to dream up the story. Again, though, it feels like a belated variation (if not a true rehash) of everything Cronenberg has already done and said, rather than a new, belated take on the same themes. What bothers me the most is that the main character never feels that he is truly disturbed at his psychic core by what is happening to him; Vincent Cassel, certainly on par with James Woods or James Spader, is good enough as a cool, cool tech entrepreneur with a penchant for minimalism and cryptonecrophilia, but if there’s any compulsion and passion, he’s there. it’s just not enough to hold the film together.
And that’s what disappoints me the most about the “shroud”
Perhaps even worse, his supposed fascination never feels real, authentic, consuming. Our hero has no descent into the dark side, no journey through the unexplored, harsh swamps of the soul or modern society. That the other pole of the director’s work – technology – is never really addressed. His best horror films explore the collective unconscious and how we humans relate to technology. That there is no real opposition between the organic and the mechanical, but an actual symbiosis.
There’s nothing like that here, aside from an interesting premise that’s never really explored
How our instincts and unconscious desires understand us to reappropriate, merge and do unspeakable things with our gadgets. With cell phones, self-driving Teslas, and personal artificial intelligence, it feels like checking the uninspiring boxes. A.I.