47/43

acceptable is perhaps the right word?

Karsh, an innovative businessman and grieving widower, builds a device to connect with the dead inside the burial shroud. Diane Kruger replaced Léa Seydoux in her role. Reference in Film Junk Podcast: Episode 961: In violent nature + TIFF 2024 ( 2024). Compared to the very mediocre “Future Crimes”, Cronenberg’s previous attempt and return to the body horror subgenre that made him famous, “The Shrouds”; is a return to something… But, as in the previous film, in almost every scene of "The Shrouds" you can probably think of another similar Cronenberg film that, quite possibly, did it better.

You shouldn’t expect any answers anyway

Perhaps you’ll be most reminded of the great “Crash,” which dealt much more memorably with similar themes of macabre voyeurism and sexual fascination with death, physical decay, and wounds. It’s the bane of older, successful filmmakers that their latest offerings are constantly compared to their earlier masterpieces, but it’s also inevitable when said filmmakers are so clearly lacking in fresh ideas. That the story, which is far more elaborate than in "Future Crimes", doesn’t work literally nowhere, it’s not a big deal – it’s just an epiphenomenon to play with for the more fundamental themes. But it’s still challenging to follow our rather bland protagonist through a kind of investigation that becomes more tedious by the minute. I challenge you to really care about any of the answers surrounding the many mysteries at the heart of "Platan".

Perhaps even worse, its supposed fascination never feels real, authentic, exhausting

What matters is the psyche of our protagonist, as clearly demonstrated by the opening scene (and probably the last one, which made a portion of the packed theater laugh with its rather spectacular dropping of the story in the middle of nowhere). Those two scenes really work to convey the idea that the story is actually about processing someone’s grief over the death of a loved one, which makes sense considering Cronenberg drew from his wife’s death to craft the story. Yet again, it all feels like a late a variation (if not an actual repetition) of things Cronenberg has already done and said, rather than a new, late-night angle on those same issues. What bothers me most is that the protagonist never feels like he’s really troubled in his own psychological state. to the core because of what happens to him; Vincent Cassel, who is certainly the equal of James Woods or James Spader, is quite good as a cold, cold tech entrepreneur who loves minimalism and crypto necrophilia, but when it comes to expressing any kind of compulsion and fascination, there is simply too little to sustain the film.

And that, to me, is what is most disappointing about "Shrouds"

There is no descent into the shadow side for our hero, no journey through the uncharted, rough swamps of his soul – or of contemporary society. As the other half of the director’s oeuvre, technology, never really deals with. His best horror films explore the collective unconscious and how we human beings relate to technology. How there is no real opposition between the organic and the machine but a real symbiosis in the coming. How our instincts and unconscious desires make us think we are re-appropriated and merged and we do unspeakable things with our gadgets.

The part of the plot involving the A

Nothing like that here, with an interesting premise that’s never really been explored. It features cell phones, self-driving Teslas, and personal artificial intelligence as if you’re checking off uninspired boxes. I. assistant should have been, like so much else, fleshed out, although I realized – behind our machines and supposedly autonomous technology, there are us and our undisguised, shameful longings. It’s a shame "The Shrouds" decides to stay on the surface rather than digging up the dead bodies that haunt our fantasies.