From the left: French actor Vincent Cassel, Canadian director David Cronenberg and German actress Diane Kruger arrive for the screening of The Shrouds at the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France, on May 20.LOIC VENANCE/Getty Images
David Cronenberg is dead, long live David Cronenberg.
Only a few years ago, it seemed that the filmmaker had abandoned cinema, content to let his incendiary 2014 satire Maps to the Stars serve as his last will and testament. Yet after spending nearly a decade away from the screen, Cronenberg resurrected his stomach-churning reputation with 2022′s magnificently imaginative Crimes of the Future. And now, Canada’s greatest, very much alive filmmaker is back with The Shrouds, a thriller that digs into the mystery that has haunted much of the Cronenberg canon: death itself.
Starring his Eastern Promises and A Dangerous Method collaborator Vincent Cassel, Cronenberg’s new film follows Karsh, a Toronto businessman whose company GraveTech has revolutionized the act of mourning. Before going six feet under, GraveTech’s deceased clients are covered in a high-tech cloth that allows loved ones to monitor the decay of the body in real time. But after the grave of his wife is desecrated, Karsh – alongside his former sister-in-law (Diane Kruger) and her ex-husband (Guy Pearce) – falls into an existential journey of reality, memory, sex, and the expiration date that we are all staring down.
Yet The Shrouds isn’t the final act of a filmmaker ready to give up the ghost – it is a ferociously alive peeling back of Cronenberg’s favoured themes, charged with eroticism and accented with a biting sense of humour.
Ahead of the Shrouds world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival this week, The Globe and Mail spoke with Cronenberg about life, death and the cinema in-between.
This film feels deeply personal for you. Is it fair to say that it was pulled from your own journey of grief after the death of your wife Carolyn in 2017?
As always, there’s a huge mixture of fact and fiction and the proportions change from movie to movie. Even A Dangerous Method has some of me in there. But there’s always a hugely personal element, and here it’s quite strong. It took me a couple of years to think about this after Carolyn’s death. I had many things to deal with at the time, pragmatic stuff that anybody who has been in that situation knows about.
Two years ago, Viggo Mortensen called Crimes of the Future your most autobiographical film, which you politely disagreed with. Do you think that The Shrouds might be the movie that, to paraphrase your own words, most cuts your stomach open and offers parts of it to the audience?
[Laughs] Well, I think The Brood was the first movie that was most autobiographical, because it was about my divorce, which was at that point one of the worst things that happened to me. It was more realistic for me than Kramer vs. Kramer – I also had a kid involved – and I thought that The Brood was much more accurate in terms of anger and rage and sadness. So maybe The Shrouds is my second-most autobiographical movie.
Was making this a cathartic experience?
Art gives you the illusion of control, the illusion of meaning. Is that cathartic? I don’t think so. It doesn’t diminish the pain, but it gives you a way to engage in that it’s not just curling up in the fetal position.
Cassel and Kruger in a scene from The Shroud. David Cronenberg's latest thriller digs into the mystery that has haunted much of the Cronenberg canon: death itself.Sophie Giraud/Touchwood
Death is not a foreign subject to your work. Only a few years ago, your daughter Caitlin made a short, The Death of David Cronenberg, in which you curl up to your own corpse. But did The Shrouds make you sit down and think about your own end?
So, there was an Italian psychiatrist who visited me in Toronto a while ago, he wanted to interview me because he specialized in writing about cinema and psychiatry. He asked me, “How are you dealing with the death of your wife of 43 years?” He thought I needed therapy to get through it. And I told him how I’m dealing is, well, I’m suffering. And he said, “Okay, you don’t need me.” There are so many ways to avoid suffering because it can be incredibly painful. Drugs, therapy. But ultimately, you’re suffering. That’s it. Religion is also partially invented just to find a way to deny the reality of death and the pain that comes with it. Since I’m an atheist, I don’t have that. You just say, well, I’m suffering. It’s painful, that’s it.
On religion, there’s a strong thread of Judaism in this film, the likes of which you haven’t explored since your 2007 short, At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema of the World. We get discussions of the Jewish concept of the soul. There’s the tombstone desecration, which I couldn’t help but read as echoing a favoured tactic of antisemites. What compelled you to dig into that part of your history now?
My family was very secular. But my wife, her father was Orthodox, so my main connection with Judaism in terms of religion came through her family. Whereas my own connection was intellectual, philosophical. But when someone dies, and you’re an atheist, how do you want to bury your Orthodox wife, or vice versa? It seemed natural to me for that to be an issue that had to be discussed. And if your ambition is to create a high-tech cemetery in different countries with different cultures and religions, like Karsh, then I’m engaging with that mix and how explosive it is. The structure of the narrative forced me to deal with that.
Like Viggo, Vincent seems able to latch himself onto your wavelength with ease. And as with Crimes, there seems to be more than a little bit of yourself in the lead character.
Vincent is a very different guy than Viggo, but there is an ease and understanding and a trust. Certainly he was very much aware of the personal elements in this, and did model himself a little after me. Vincent’s rhythm is normally quite quick and rapid. I told him, you’ve got to chill, slow it down. I also said he should model his accent after mine, my midtown Toronto accent.
Cronenberg’s new film follows Karsh, played by Cassel, a Toronto businessman whose company GraveTech has revolutionized the act of mourning.Touchwood
This might be the greatest midtown Toronto movie ever made. We get Cedarvale Park, mentions of restaurants Fat Pasha and United Bakers …
In Dead Ringers, I mention Rosedale, too. There are some times when you’re making Toronto look like New York or L.A., but mostly for me, it’s shooting Toronto for Toronto.
I just liked seeing the bag of milk, an explicitly Ontario thing.
Exactly. I don’t hold back.
The film was originally conceived as a Netflix series. What happened?
I pitched it to Netflix, which got me out of the house. I was interested in the Netflix phenomenon and how potent it was. It’s cinema, but a different kind. Movies are like short stories or novellas, but with a series you can create a novel. Netflix was enthusiastic and financed the writing of the first episode. And then they liked that and financed writing the second. And then they decided, well, not to do it. It was surprising, but bless them because they got it created to the point where I could make a movie out of it.
A few years ago, you told me that you don’t watch movies in a cinema at all, and “Netflix is the future, it’s the present.” And this was prepandemic, before the streamer really took over. Has that divide between streaming and moviegoing grown deeper for you since?
I don’t go to the theatre much. I have hearing problems that I can deal with better at home – I like to watch with the subtitles on as a result. And every time that I have a screening in a theatre, there’s a problem. The bulb is turned down so it’s not as bright as it should be, this and that. I have nostalgia for the cinema experience from when I was a kid, but I don’t think it’s the best way to see a movie. Now streaming has hit a wall – once you get all the subscribers you can, what do you do but raise the prices? But I think it’s a phenomenon that’s here to stay. And I think movie houses are going to be quite niche.
In terms of what’s on the horizon, is work progressing on turning your novel Consumed into a feature or series with producer Robert Lantos?
We’re still talking about it, but I’m not sure if I’d want to do it myself. Writing the novel was not a prelude to making a movie – it was the act of writing a novel. So, I’m not sure what I’m going to do next.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
The Shrouds opens in Canadian theatres Sept. 25.