“The Shrouds” review: Cronenberg returns, elegant and obsessed with death

Taking a new film by David Cronenberg sometimes evokes the strangeness of a beloved cat bringing a new killing at your door: it is sort of disturbing and affecting, a horror yet a gift, and decidedly bizarre but also sad and even funny.

The subjects of sorrow and biotechnology in the latest Canadian macabre offer, “The Shrouds”, are also known to call a host of contradictory feelings. Is it surprising that, in the hands of a provocateur without surgical fear with mourning in his mind after the death of his 43 -year -old wifeThese interconnected subjects triggered another fresh, cunning and disturbing work on our incessant fascination for what the body betrays? If it ends up being the last of Cronenberg, he will be released with a worldly and heavy epitaph.

As the beginnings take place, the filmmaker offers a theme blind date that a first satirist like George Saunders would envy. “To what extent are you dark to go?” The widowed entrepreneur Karsh (a tired and distinguished Vincent Cassel) asks his elegant companion as wide (Jennifer Dale) when she expresses the curiosity of her work. (As if eating in a restaurant in a place he has called Gratagech is not the first clue to his head space.)

With clinical enthusiasm, Karsh shows her his several million dollars adaptation mechanism: a taste cemetery with taste of tombstones of human height with screens that allow deep pocket mourning, via a specially encrypted application, to look in real time and from any angle, the decomposing corpse of their buried friends. Karsh indicates his wife, Becca, for having viewed (supervisor?) And the gaze on the face of his appointment says everything: the worst dinner and a film of all time.

Karsh's obsession – with the decomposition of his wife and the growth of his business – is real, so much so that when he notices unusual nodes inside the zoomed skull of Becca and that his cemetery is vandalized in what looks like a targeted act, he wants answers. The surviving twin sister of Becca, Terry (a double role Diane Kruger), a committed skeptical, suspects that the nodes follow the devices and that the experimental treatment of Becca cancer was not increasing.

Having things with his brother-in-law of the technological assistant Maury (a hirsute Guy Pearce), Karsh wonders if ecological demonstrators or religious or competitors are thwarted by its global expansion plans, which include a lava field in Iceland. Meanwhile, a horrible and sexy wife of the rich and dying Hungarian investor (Sandrine Holt), with whom Karsh begins with, suggests that the Russians or the Chinese could see the potential in the hacking of the grievers of Gravetech. Ashes to ashes, given to data?

Leave it to our pre-eminent fantasist of bodily fusion (“The Fly”, “Videodrome”, “Crash”, “exissenz”) to envisage a vision of the 21st century near the 21st century of techno-intrigue which, in conjunction with lifestyle improvements, we already have-biotechnological devices, the reality of Karsh, the AI ​​assistant and reality that Cronenberg. A large part of what he explored on the screen has come true: everything is a creative convenience, a threat and an excitement. And there, like an old friend, is the regular composer of Cronenberg, Howard Shore, with a synth groan to keep the mood disturbing.

“The Shrouds” can look like a thriller (dead, theft, espionage), but its elegant and icy look is to present Karsh as a rabbit burrow pawn of his sorrow, which takes place through the film in increasingly intimate and erotic bedroom conversations, in particular a ghost recovery of naked chamber scenes with cancer ridiculed Becca. We are always told that the body is a temple, a ship. But leave it to Cronenberg to also note that in our darkest moments, the body most often looks like a plot.