A romantic and beautiful take on love, loss and death

Though it could be classed as a thriller, David Cronenberg's 'The Shrouds' is so much more, praises Clarisse Loughrey

- Clarisse Loughrey

“I read all the grief books and none of them matched exactly my grief,” director David Cronenberg told the LA Times in April; his wife of 38 years, Carolyn Zeifman, died in 2017. The Shrouds is about her absence. It’s not autobiographical, though its protagonist, Karsh (Vincent Cassel), dresses only in black and wears his hair in a white-grey swoop in a vague imitation of the Canadian auteur.

Karsh also feels as Cronenberg does. He explains that his grief is not literary, nor intellectual - but visceral, a tangible pull towards the dead. He feels an urge to climb into the coffin with his late wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). His is the belief that we love not only the soul of someone, but its precious home: the body.

Maybe that’s not how everyone feels about love and the loss of love, but it’s so beautifully, erotically, romantically, and compulsively depicted in The Shrouds that the idea sticks to the bones like the small nodules Karsh discovers on Becca’s skeleton postmortem. What they are and how they came to be form one of the film’s great mysteries.