CRIMES OF THE FUTURE
2022
Written and directed by David Cronenberg
THE SHROUDS
2025
Written and directed by David Cronenberg
The facts of the matter are as follows: in 2017, the wife of filmmaker David Cronenberg, Carolyn Zeifman, succumbed at the (relatively) young age of 66 to her struggle with cancer, and died (meanwhile, making matters worse, his elder sister and frequent collaborator, Denise Cronenberg, died in 2020 at the not-relatively-young age of 81, reportedly more-or-less of "being 81"); in 2024, he finished The Shrouds, and armed with the above information and that title, you would not fail to guess what it's about, though, unlike David Cronenberg, you probably wouldn't be creative or goth enough to come up with the new startup idea that its title refers to; and for 2022, in between his wife's death (again, from cancer) and The Shrouds, he made Crimes of the Future, bearing the title of one of his quasi-feature, quasi-student films all the way back in 1970, before he even had a career as such, to which the newer film bears almost zero resemblance (though you could potentially guess they're by the same guy even without knowing who David Cronenberg is), except that the 2022 Crimes of the Future picks up on a throwaway idea from the 1970 Crimes of the Future, regarding a "creative" cancer that maybe isn't a disease per se, and is maybe something revolutionary, though whatever else, in the Cronenbergian gaze, it is held to be beautiful.
I'll have gotten most of the speculative psychoanalysis out of my system by the end of this paragraph, but it's hard not to interpret these films (Crimes of the Future being his first since 2014) as operating somewhat in concert: Crimes is less obviously in conversation with Cronenberg's misfortune, thanks to how "the disease that's actually cool, or at least has its upsides" describes many of Cronenberg's best-loved works in the genre of body horror, whereas the bodily basis of human existence has been the subject in virtually all of them (even Cosmopolis spends a lot of time on a concerning prostate); with The Shrouds, of course, "obvious" severely understates the matter, and Cronenberg hasn't been coy about it, outright telling you that it's a movie about his grief. They do work together pretty well: the earlier film (though it's also known that Cronenberg had something akin to its script already in hand not long after the turn of the century) could be interpreted as an oblique bit of wish-fulfilment, a "wouldn't it be nicer if cancer worked that way, or you could at least glean some artistic value from it?", that also happens to be a wallow in the nostalgic old stuff for a guy who had stepped away from body horror twenty years earlier; the subsequent film starts with a dead wife, and while it certainly has its own fancies (it is, in fact, about how fancies can capture the minds of the vulnerable and distort them with obsession), none of those fancies invoke comforting science fiction conceits about how fatal cancer actually works—in The Shrouds, it fucks you up, it cripples you, it kills you, and then your husband wanders around for two hours building a creepy monument to you, feeling as if it would almost be an insult if he continued to go on living himself.
It's probably not for this reason, actually, that Crimes of the Future is the better movie, but that's how it shook out, and I'm still not that high on Crimes. Regardless, Crimes takes us to next Tuesday A.D., and while it's not so distant a future, things have gotten pretty strange: relatedly or not, sometime in the past several years two big things have happened—most humans have stopped feeling pain and also infectious disease has disappeared (whether as a result of all bacteria vanishing or humans developing super-duper immune systems is not made clear, but probably the latter given the implications of the former)—and, in Cronenberg's view, that can mean only one thing, which is of course "recreational surgery." For Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), who can still feel pain, it's not just a hobby, it's a profession; he and his surgeon partner Caprice (Lea Seydoux) put on shows wherein Saul—who like many humans these days is growing weird and interesting tumors, tantamount to whole new glands producing whole new hormones with interesting biochemical properties—has those tumors removed for the entertainment and edification of paying audiences, and their act is perhaps the biggest or at least the hippest in the entire underground scene of performance art surgery. Hence when he, a bit reluctantly, undertakes a visit to the National Organ Registry under the new laws regarding his condition, even the registrars Wippet and Timlin (Don McKellar and Kristen Stewart) are a bit starstruck and wind up getting sucked into the subculture themselves. Meanwhile, as a disconnected prologue involving a mother's (Lihi Kornowski's) murder of her own son (Sozos Sotiris) obliquely indicated, there's a whole conspiracy evolving alongside humanity's new organs, led by one Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), the boy's father, who enjoys purple "candy" bars that appear to be immediately-deadly poison to anyone else, and who prevails upon Saul and Caprice to do a different kind of show, an autopsy of his own child's body, promising "surprises."
This is all reasonably neat, though that is some awkward Goddamn set-up Cronenberg's come up with here, working backwards from "so what kind of world would it take for backalley surgery to be the new punk rock?" and apparently only belatedly realizing he needs, like, at least three separate premises, for which he's not interested in doing anything more than implying they might come from the same causes; and since the prime purpose of the movie is just to wander around exploring fairly narrow ideas about this world and the subcultures Cronenberg's invented—not even really tell a story as such, though Crimes does eventually develop a decent thrillerish plot—it all feels incredibly jerry-rigged, and I confess I never really stopped being distracted by it. I don't even think it was necessary, and frankly I think the "no pain" and "no infections" conceits necessarily make the movie worse: the physical and psychological safety of the surgery—Saul hypothetically does still feel pain, though I think you would also forget this very quickly from how Cronenberg is directing Mortensen to react to these consensual violations of his body—makes it much squarer than it seems like "in the future, the cool kids will cut each other up for fun" ought to be, or even could be.
But then, a big part of it is self-critique, or at least a variation on Cronenbergian themes, and veers into I think intentional self-parody: at one point an anxious but clearly-aroused Timlin (potentially explaining why Jena Malone never had the stardom she deserved, because Stewart already was a star and takes the roles that Malone probably would've gotten otherwise only to play them more-or-less the same way; though it is a nice, squirrelly performance) asks Saul to confirm her insight: "the surgery is sex, right?" And, well, yeah, if you like your movies to make their subtext blaring all-caps text in the first twenty-five minutes, though it is naturally a very funny moment. Later on, about halfway through, we go with Saul to another performance artist's show—a dancing man covered head to toe in ears, who's sewn his eyes and mouth shut, to boot—and so all very gross horror imagery, but it takes all the decorum Saul has to call it "fine." So there's still an undercurrent here, that I think is interesting in at least a meta way, of Cronenberg revisiting his old styles and basically wondering if the exploits of his youth were fair, and if body horror (not his preferred term) even still disgusts him anymore, or if, in approaching the mysteries of the mortal body with an opener heart (not to say an opener abdomen), he might get more out of it than an "ewwww."
That's a somewhat arid way for a movie to be interesting, though ("hey, have you seen The Fly? how about Videodrome? Scanners? I'm afraid it's somewhat requisite to understand how this movie about body horror performance art is about me, David Cronenberg"), and the "ewwww" is why Cronenberg's a superstar director beloved by everyone into the present day despite most observers agreeing his most vital work is at a minimum thirty years old (and, myself, I'd say forty). It doesn't help that his 21st century approach to writing and performance is a lot more mannered (at least since Cosmopolis, where mannered, inhuman dialogue is the star and Robert Pattinson was just one of its several vessels), though this is somewhat Cronenberg coming full circle except now he has legitimate and good actors to do it instead of semi-employed Canadians like when he made his first Crimes of the Future. So too with how Crimes presents itself visually: shot in Greece for cost reasons (it's a lower-budget movie if not a truly cheap one), it's hard to determine if Cronenberg doesn't just prefer things to look this way—newly-minted bureaucracies operating out of ratty corners of a rotten yellow office building, everything looking like the most ramshackle and barely-dressed set even if it's probably an actual Greek street, a digital crispness that's sort of offensive in its sterility even though what we're looking at is pronounced infrastructural decay—and if it's rather authentic to its director's late style, it's been a kind of crummy and underwhelming late style.
Still, it's a fun movie, even if I haven't made it seem like one. (I've got holes in my Cronenberg filmography wider than Saul's zippered sideways belly-pussy, but while Cosmopolis might be a skosh more interesting, Crimes of the Future is the most enjoyment I've gotten out of Cronenberg since, Jesus, the 1980s.) Mortensen's one of those legitimate and good actors I mentioned, skulking through the movie in a hoodie and mask like a grim-and-gritty TV superhero for no apparent reason except it's his brand and elevating "coughing a lot" to the level of characterization; Seydoux is another one of those actors, though I guess she got enough of Cronenbergian gross-out alt-porno in this one, given she dropped out of his next (or it could be scheduling, but she had been set to play the wife in The Shrouds). It is, anyway, never boring, and is very enthusiastic about spending about the first half of its 107 minutes meandering through its performance art milieu, the biotechnology of its weird future, and the quiet quasi-apocalypse that it's decided to impose upon humanity, and then actually does kick in with its plot for the second half, still slightly meanderingly (one of its twist untwists about halfway through, and affects nothing) but at least with an increased sense of exigence. If it accomplishes nothing else, this Crimes is a lot better than Cronenberg's first Crimes; on this one, he could afford sound recording, for instance.
The Shrouds, I regret to say, never gets better than its first ten or so minutes, which establishes its basic situation (and in a dream sequence gets as close as this movie that's sold as "it's gonna be necrophilia, right?" will ever get, more's the pity) and introduces us to its weird premise. That situation concerns Karsh (Vincent Cassel by way of the "David Cronenberg" Halloween costume I'd love to see at Spirit this year), a Canadian businessman who seven years ago—the movie technically premiered in 2024, so you do the math—lost his beloved wife Becca (Diane Kruger) to cancer. The premise, meanwhile, is that this has inspired him to disrupt the cemetery as we understand it: instead of just plain old headstones and coffins and a process of corruption concealed by several feet of dirt, Karsh has developed "the shrouds," a woven set of sensors that tracks in high-definition the decay of a corpse so shrouded, which you can look at on the screens built into his high-tech headstones, at the cemetery itself, or on the app, any time you feel like it. (It's a very Cronenbergian concept, but to quote the filmmaker, who is not so detached from reality as Karsh, "In this film, I have invented a clientele for the cemetery that probably doesn't exist." I mean, I certainly wouldn't pay you money for it, and while there is probably some market, for there has in the past been a market, for "having a loved one's dead body around to look at," this has been based mostly on technologies that prevent the decay of the loved one, rather than revel in their return to dust.) The best scene in the whole movie, anyway, comes in these first ten minutes, and assumes you know what the movie's about and you haven't put the wrong thing on, and it follows Karsh on a date with a woman set up by a mutual friend, and Karsh (semi-)naturally takes her to his own restaurant, which just so happens to be on the grounds of his e-cemetery, and for this stretch The Shrouds is an extraordinarily successful black comedy ("how dark do you want to get?") as our hero fields questions from his date with surprisingly chipper gruesomeness that doesn't feel like "harrowing grief" so much as a mode of existence he's lived in for so long he only has a tenuous, intellectual grasp of how much of a total freak he is.
A lot of the movie is a comedy as much as anything, in fact, but it's not ever as successfully or robustly funny as this scene, and like Crimes of the Future before it, we have ourselves a first half that's been dedicated principally to wandering about the debris of Karsh's life—his relationship with his crazy dog groomer sister-in-law Terry (also Kruger, they're twins for added perversity), his relationship with the AI assistant based on Becca's appearance (also Kruger, in case you missed the theme), Karsh's reluctant reliance on Terry's full-on mentally-ill geek ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce)—that eventually wheels out a "thriller" plot scaffolding that's been hinted at by the curious vandalism that's wrecked Karsh's e-cemetery, undertaken by unknown parties, except where Crimes actually put down the gas regarding its thriller plot, Shrouds never really sees much of a need to, and this really is just "next Tuesday A.D.," and, actually, because of how long it takes for movies like this to get distribution, last Tuesday A.D. (I bet you Canadians are stoked that your precious commie film grants went to buying David Cronenberg a Tesla), so the world around Karsh isn't actually all that interesting, topping out with a somewhat dubious conflict with environmentalists who oppose an Icelandic e-cemetery in a lava field when the whole reason it's a lava field at all is that whatever's there's very likely to 1)be destroyed and 2)not have significant impact on any particular ecosystem, due to frequent volcanic eruptions. (Not helping matters, again, is Cronenberg's screenplay, and Shrouds gets the worse of the two as far as "you're an Anglo-Canadian, so why does it always feel like somebody is badly translating your dialogue?", notably the rampaging overuse of a term that Cronenberg almost always uses like he's an ESL speaker, "political"—sometimes appropriately, as with the Icelandic environmentalists, sometimes not, as in "I have a political problem [referring to a possible interaction with the local department of health and environmental control's graveyard division]", though the grating thing is that it feels like Cronenberg didn't actually write it alone, and got Owen Wilson to script doctor, or at least that's my working theory for why there's something like a dozen deadpan "wows" peppering the dialogue.)
Shrouds spends an awful lot of time on the mystery of who wrecked Karsh's cemetery and what sinister conspiracies it might portend, sometimes in a relatively twisty way, but it never feels like it's remotely urgent enough about it to devote all that time—it's always more concerned with how conspiracy theories get Terry wet but her conspiracist ex most assuredly does not, and how Karsh's tumble into paranoia thereby intrigues her, whilst Karsh likewise pursues a new adulterous tryst with the blind wife (Sandrine Holt) of a Hungarian oligarch who's considering investing in Karsh's new venture, which is something that it seems like it ought to have some peril attached to it, especially amidst such anxious circumstances, but I get the impression it never even actually occurred to Cronenberg that it could—and it's a combination that kind of doesn't work, this fairly sprawling space where Cronenberg's written the word "thriller" but put basically no thriller energy whatsoever into that space. (And I do get it, thematically: the "thriller" is maybe the biggest joke here, and Shrouds hopes more to examine how fantasies that purport to explain a cruel world can be a comfort by at least ordering the chaos of it. But 120 minutes sure is a lot of set-up to get to that punchline.) And so it mostly only moseys about, meaning that the most successful stuff besides the opening bad date is where it leans furthest into full-tilt art cinema, with the repeated motif of "flashbacks" that are more like abstracted conceptual reconstructions of Karsh's last days with Becca, centered around their bedroom and more to the point Kruger's disarming nudity, the possibility or impossibility of sexuality between Karsh and Becca, and how each time a bit more of Becca is missing than the last. (Shrouds certainly provides a very nice acting reel for Kruger between her three roles.)
These, in any case, actually do cut to the romantic (capital-R Romantic, even) heart of the movie. I don't want to say they're the only times it feels like it's dangerously grappling with Poevian grief and the biological reality of the human body—there's an extremely Cronenbergian indifference to Becca's mutilations here, that I don't truly doubt the intentions of, but is so good-hearted I wonder if it could be Cronenberg's fantasy of his own decency; but it delivers some good beats anyway—but it's definitely the case that if Kruger's not in the scene, in one or another of her guises, then the film simply does not have access to those emotions. It feels like the grief has staled in The Shrouds, and that's a subject for art, too, but it's necessarily chillier, and while that's kind of been Cronenberg's usual deal for ages, I'm not sure he's threading these tones to create a coherent story out his grief—as opposed to a plot, which isn't coherent either but doesn't necessarily have to be—and if you subsequently learn that Shrouds was intended as a television show, for Netflix, and the end of the movie was actually the end of the first episode of that show, with our man Karsh lighting out for the territory to spread his taphonomic fetish across the globe, the form this movie has taken suddenly makes a lot more sense even if, as with Karsh and Terry and Maury's own conspiratorial explanations for things, it doesn't really make anything better. (And that ending, though "healthier" in an ambiguous sense, sure is the exact wrong one to give us a dose of melodramatic catharsis and good freakiness.) I would not call the movie a failure, even so; it's sometimes a little dreary (and not always or even usually in the way "this character study of a guy who watches his wife decompose" ought to be "dreary"), but it isn't wholly devoid of momentum, and it's got Kruger being pretty great or at least very game, and Cassel being reliably amusing in his Cassel-y way. I just expected a harder, more upsetting movie than the one Cronenberg allowed himself to make.
Score, Crimes of the Future: 7/10
Score, The Shrouds: 6/10
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