Usually-for-the-worse physical transformation bound to a character’s fears or fascinations has been at the vanguard of Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg’s movies since he started making them in the late 1960s. His latest, The Shrouds, continues in the body-horror traditions of the films for which he’s most celebrated — The Brood (1979), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), and Crash (1996) among them — but differentiates itself for being a more obviously personal project in a filmography whose bearing to Cronenberg’s own life has generally been more oblique.

The Shrouds’ protagonist, Karsh (Vincent Cassel), wears his hair in a neat, snow-white quiff just like Cronenberg’s; he also is having a difficult time adjusting to life as a widower. (The filmmaker’s spouse and collaborator, Carolyn Zeifman, died of cancer in 2017.) Whereas Cronenberg imbues his grief into his art, the cancer-caused death of Karsh’s wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), motivates him to found GraveTech, a provocative technology that allows people to watch their late loved ones decompose in their coffins either from an app or a screen attached to their gravestone. “I wanted to get into the box with her,” Karsh says of his business’s genesis to an increasingly nauseous woman (Jennifer Dale) with whom he goes on a blind date at the dour, graveyard-neighboring restaurant he owns. 

Read the full column at South Sound.

Photo credit: Courtesy of Sophie Giraud/Sideshow Films/Janus Films