OFFICIAL SELECTION – IN COMPETITION
It is a final feature film in the color of mourning, all in shades of black and shades of gray, with the clean lines of a stele, by the Canadian David Cronenberg, 81 years old, painter of the flesh in its confines and unexpected bubbling (Videodrome, Fly, Crashfor the best known), unveils at the Cannes Film Festival, marking the turn of the second week of competition. The Shrouds is about the loss of a loved one, a devilishly romantic theme that the filmmaker is careful not to subject to any effusion, lyrical or dramatic. He approaches it, as usual, under the cooling filter of technological anticipation, capable of reconfiguring the relationships between the human body and the machine.
The film was written following the death of Carolyn Cronenberg, wife and collaborator of the filmmaker, in 2017. This mourning, rather than offering a key to understanding, gives the film a very personal color, and sheds light on the emotion which irrigates it deeply.
So personal, in fact, that Vincent Cassel, seventeen years later Shadow Promises (2007), composes a hero who, with his slender silhouette and silvery fleece, looks almost exactly like Cronenberg. Karsh, a wealthy entrepreneur from Toronto, including high-tech funeral directors, cannot recover from the death of his wife, Rebecca (Diane Kruger). As a result, it has developed a connected grave system, which it markets in its fleet of equipped cemeteries. At the heart of this technology, a shroud equipped with sensors takes a contact image of the buried body, transmitted on a screen integrated into the tombstone. The disconsolate engineer can thus follow the decomposition of the beloved corpse from day to day: the relationship continues beyond death, for a body which continues to transform. But Karsh soon observed the formation of strange nodules on the surface of the skeleton which alerted him to the integrity of the remains.
Cybernetic conspiracy
To this postulate, as twisted as it is stimulating, questioning in a Promethean way the complex of impossible mourning and necrophilic desire, is grafted another plot of a paranoid type. One morning, Karsh discovers that several of his graves, including his wife’s, have not only been vandalized, but hacked, and converted into a surveillance system. The investigation leads him on the trail of an obscure cybernetic conspiracy, involving divergent interests (a rival oncologist or environmental activists hostile to his technological innovations), even foreign powers (China? Russia?). Each step taken sends him back to the same blind center: Rebecca’s troubled personality, which had many gray areas.
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