This year’s Cannes Film Festival has featured more than its fair share of stunning and contentious films and events, ranging from Francis Ford Coppola’s return Megalopolis to Yorgos Lanthimos’ “sickening” Kinds of Kindness, starring Emma Stone.
We have seen erections, lots of severed fingers, a touch of cannibalism, and more than one gang bang.
However, the horror genre appears to be having a particularly gory moment, owing in part to The Substance and its naked leading lady, Demi Moore, who also participates in an unusually gruesome fight sequence with co-star Margaret Qualley.
However, one of the body horror genre’s originators, David Cronenberg (a.k.a. the Baron of Blood), has shown his latest film, The Shrouds, at the prestigious festival, serving up a large
First reactions to it include praise for The Shrouds’ ‘dazzling ambition and deep emotion brimming six feet under’, with others simply saying it ‘rocks’ and calling it ‘brilliant’.
Meanwhile other reviews have accused it of ‘verging on self-parody’ (Variety) and ‘lifeless’ (Vulture).
The film, starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, and Guy Pearce, depicts Karsh (Cassel), a 50-year-old widower who is inconsolable following the death of his wife Becca (Kruger) and proceeds to build GraveTech, a new and controversial device that allows him to feel near to his spouse’s body.
The film’s opening minutes depict Karsh experiencing a nightmare about his wife while visiting the dentist, only for the doctor to try to console him by offering JPEGs of her old dental records.
It quickly makes sense, however, when you learn the specifics of what he has invented, which is only one of the film’s many frightening elements.
The Shrouds showcase corpses regularly at every stage of decay
The Shrouds will put you to the test with its complicated, cerebral analysis of how people mourn and cope with the death of loved ones; in this case, they choose to develop interactive camera shrouds that wrap around bodies and enable for monitoring.
Friends and family can visit the interconnected cemetery and view the body live on each grave’s screen, using the app (‘encrypted’ of course, with an awareness of the pun) to navigate and zoom in on specific portions of their deceased loved one’s rotting flesh, if they so desire.
Karsh introduces the audience to all of this during a blind date at the gourmet restaurant in the cemetery that he also owns, which ends with him offering to take his date to see
Diane Kruger got to see what she looked like ‘in death’
Kruger spends a significant amount of time as Becca, one of her three roles, playing essentially a rotting body.
At this point, four years after Kruger’s death, the film’s CGI has reduced her character’s body to primarily bone and some tissue.
Discussing her reaction to the gory sight of herself decomposing, Kruger joked at the film’s press conference on Tuesday: ‘I thought it looked pretty good death.’
She later explained that when she first watched the film, she found it ‘more fascinating than repulsive’, seeing her own corpse.
The Troy and National Treasure star, 47, admitted she would have ‘been completely frazzled on set’ if the movie had come her way 10 years ago, but instead felt she ‘thrived’ thanks to Cronenberg’s trust and love, which she called ‘incredibly moving’.
Cronenberg, the filmmaker of The Fly, also disclosed that himself appears in the film as a body being retrieved from a grave, having borrowed a fake corpse made of himself for the Canadian TV series Slasher a few years earlier.
‘So I’ve had the experience, and I honestly do not look as good as Diane,’ the 81-year-old filmmaker laughed.
The Shrouds features a large amount of nudity and nipples
But Kruger is the one who is constantly completely naked as Becca. In her non-corpse form, she remains a mangled body missing an arm and a breast on her left side, the wounds closed with primitive-looking stitches.
However, in her portrayal as Becca’s sister Terry, we see her fully naked in a gory, groaning sex scene after she acknowledges that the conspiracy theories at the centre of the film, which follow an attack on the cemetery, excite her on.
Kruger’s third role, as Kash’s AI assistant Hunny, includes a scene when she appears naked onscreen.
‘I’ve never done anything like this. I’ve never done this much nudity on screen, so I felt very vulnerable all the time,’ Kruger shared, before praising Cassel’s support.
‘I publicly want to call out my co-star here for being so kind to me. And having – literally – my back. And my front and centre!’
The biggest gasp-worthy scene that will really set your teeth on edge
If you are uneasy with the premise of The Shrouds, you will cringe, chuckle, and look away.
However, one scene that literally drew gasps of horror saw Karsh’s worst worry come true, poisoning a sweet moment.
Karsh has nightmares and memories of his wife throughout the film, and in one of them, she comes to him in bed and they have intercourse, with her requesting that he embrace her despite the brittleness of her bones after chemotherapy.
As Karsh turns to lie behind her on the bed, holding her, we hear a loud crack that goes straight through you, and Becca shouts out in pain, indicating that her hip is fractured. Shudder.
The devastating real-life inspiration behind The Shrouds
Cronenberg discussed The Shrouds, describing it as his “most autobiographical film.”
He took a break from his profession after his wife Carolyn’s illness and subsequent death in 2017, before opting to inject this picture with his own personal struggle with sorrow and attempt to find’meaning’ in her death as an atheist.
‘In this movie, I was discussing, in a way, the death of my wife, who I had been with for 43 years. I stopped filmmaking for quite a while – five or six years – and then I felt the impulse to tell a story about that,’ he shared.
‘Not exactly realistic, not really autobiography, but somehow blending my experience of her death and my loss with some other considerations.’
A visceral film about both the physical and emotional loss suffered in death already packs a powerful punch, but with Cronenberg’s added context it takes on a new level of meaning.
The Shrouds premiered at Cannes Film Festival on May 20. A UK release date is yet to be announced.
Source My Celebrity Life.
