The Shrouds is David Cronenberg's most emotional film yet

Would you let your grief lead you six feet under?

That's one of the themes Canadian director David Cronenberg explores in his latest film, The Shrouds. Starring Vincent Cassel, the movie follows a man who has invented a technology that allows him to monitor his wife's corpse while it decomposes in its grave, as a way to continue to feel close to her.

Today on Commotion, film critics Rad Simonpillai, Rachel Ho and Kyle Buchanan join guest host Amil Niazi to discuss the Canadian horror-master's deeply personal and oddly poignant new film.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion about the film, as well as a peculiar new rule being enforced by the Oscars, and the media coverage around Ryan Coogler's Sinners, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Amil: Rad, it's not like [David Cronenberg] is a guy known for his rom-coms, right? But even by Cronenberg's standards … this is gruesome and grisly stuff. The most important question, did you like it? 

Rad: I really did. I think it's his best movie in about two decades, mainly because it is probably the most emotional movie he's ever made. I think what he's doing here is he's updating his themes, right? Cronenberg is not someone who rests on his laurels. He's not just the body horror guy that just gives you something grotesque. He's always evolving what he is doing and asking new questions and exploring new fears. In this case, he's exploring our current fears of technology in terms of AI and the internet and how, if your dead wife is now in the ether, how does that become a threat? So he's exploring a lot of the same fears, but this time in a really emotional and sentimental way that actually wrecked me.

Amil: Rachel, you've heard how emotional Rad is saying this movie is. I read that the story is rooted in his own grieving for his wife, Carolyn, who passed in 2017…. I heard that you didn't really like it that much at first, so how did that personal narrative affect your viewing?

Rachel: It changed a lot. I mean, you're right. When I first saw it at TIFF last year, I wasn't a big fan. I thought it's a bit messy. It's illogical. It just didn't quite come together for me, quite frankly. It felt more like someone doing almost an impression of a Cronenberg movie than an actual Cronenberg movie. But I kind of took a step back — and I actually have Rad to thank for it, because I spoke to him about the movie during TIFF — and I thought about it a little bit more in terms of how it relates to Cronenberg, specifically. I try not to read too much into what's going on in a director's life. I feel like sometimes you can run into the trap of maybe overreaching a little bit, projecting your own thoughts and your own feelings, what you would do in their situation. 

But I feel like with Cronenberg, he's one of those directors that you have to take his personal life into account when you look at his film. The Brood is probably the best example of that, of him taking something distinctly personal and imprinting it onto his own films. Not every director is like that, obviously; if you look at a Michael Bay movie, I don't think car chases and big explosions are a big part of his life, but … maybe they do. Who knows. But I think with Cronenberg, you have to take his personal life into account. And if I think about grieving over a spouse who's passed away, and you've been together for so long, it is going to be messy. It is going to be illogical. And sometimes it doesn't make sense in the things that happen. So I appreciate the film a lot more now when I do take into account what was going on with Cronenberg when he wrote the film.

Amil: Kyle, you talked to him for the New York Times. I'm curious what he told you about that personal relationship and how he put that personal story into the movie.

Kyle: Well, even the excerpt from the film [trailer] where Vincent Cassel's character wanted to be in that coffin with his wife as she was lowered into the ground — that is a genuine urge that Cronenberg had. When he had that urge, he didn't think that he was going to make a movie about it. He honestly did not think that he would go on to make any more movies at that point, because his wife was his longtime collaborator. He wasn't sure that he would even be physically, emotionally, mentally up to it after she passed. So this is a very personal movie.

And even though it seems so extreme, the idea of monitoring your spouse's corpse as it decays (and very Cronenberg-ian), I think it's a naturally grotesque extrapolation of the role that the dead have in our lives now. I was thinking about it the other day, that it used to be if you wanted to conjure up some sort of audio-visual experience of people who've passed, you had old pictures. You had old letters. Then eventually, it was friends who would save voicemails from the dead so they could hear that voice again. At this point now, though, we have so much to go off of. We have Instagram profiles. We have text messages. We have countless videos of a person. So, where do you go from there? Cronenberg takes it to a very perverse end of having a camera in the coffin. There's also a character that offers our protagonist the dental records, the dental X-rays of his dead wife, which seems so ludicrous. And yet, if you're grieving to that degree, wouldn't you want everything you could get your hands on?

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.