By the time US audiences are able to see David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds – the body horror master’s latest movie – almost a year will have passed since it first premiered, practically an eon in the world of film. It bowed at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024 to a sea of mostly middling reviews. Critics were thrown by its by turns “earnest and nutty” (Variety) tone – surprising, considering the film’s bleak subject matter. It follows Karsh, a tech-savvy businessman who, after his wife’s death, develops an in-coffin device that allows grieving people to watch their loved ones’ corpses as they decay.
Even with Vincent Cassel as its star, and Cronenberg’s long resumé of body-horror classics like The Fly, Videodrome and 2022’s Crimes of the Future, The Shrouds seemed to fall off of the map entirely after Cannes. For months, the independent film failed to secure distribution internationally. Now, seven months later, the film has found distributors in North America, Russia and France only. For those in the States, you’ll have to wait until the spring of this year to watch it.
The film’s quiet existence has been jolted into the spotlight again by Luca Guadagnino, the Italian director whose two 2024 projects – Challengers and Queer – had wide and successful releases. In a recent survey conducted by IndieWire, Guadagnino offered up his favourite films of the year. Of the 15 he selected, he singled out The Shrouds as the single best film he saw in 2024. That might come as a surprise to those who recognise Guadagnino as a director of romantic films.
But Guadagnino and Cronenberg are cut from the same cloth, as filmmakers who understand the specific ways love and horror seize together. The Shrouds is a distinctly personal film for Cronenberg, who lost his wife Carolyn Zeifman in 2017. (Cassel, as Karsh, has a coiffed grey hairstyle similar to Cronenberg’s own.) The film, which evoked little more than a shrug from most critics, spoke tenderly of how the loss of a loved one can conjure extreme behaviour; sending us crazy, or going to extreme lengths to prove that love existed in the first place. It was a theme present in Crimes of the Future too, in which a performance artist allowed his lover to carve him open and remove synthetically grown body parts from his flesh – in front of a live audience.
There’s something almost romantic about Guadagnino’s love for Cronenberg and his filthy, emotional films.
It shouldn’t be surprising then that, in 2022, Crimes of the Future was Guadagnino’s film of the year, when he called it a “beautiful love story”. Guadagnino’s films dwell on romantic obsession too, and how we can be driven to the extreme to prove our love. Just look at the skin-piercing romance of Bones and All, or William Lee’s almost pathetic adoration for a twink he can barely read in Queer, driving him to drug-starved diarrhoea. Heck, it might have been toned down in James Ivory’s script, but Andre Aciman’s novel Call Me by Your Name was a bodily fever dream. There’s a scene that didn’t make the film in which Elio asks Oliver to not flush after he defecates, so Elio can size up the result, and then produce his own to compare on top of it.
Guadagnino has transformed that sweet repulsion into catnip for his audiences, transcending his arthouse reputation to become the director adored most fervently by young people getting their foot in the door of the movie world. Cronenberg’s more extreme take on the same subject isn’t so palatable for some. Maybe that’s down to the ingredients: Guadagnino is a star-maker; his acrid, dangerous romances make movie stars, like Chalamet and Queer’s Drew Starkey. What Cronenberg, even in the era of horror’s box office success, is more challenging and tonally disparate. It may be that The Shrouds’ months of limbo boiled down to the fact that its wider audience is much trickier to identify than the crowds who’ll flock to something like Bones and All, a sweeping Americana romance with two sought after lead stars.
Still, there’s something almost romantic about Guadagnino’s love for Cronenberg and his filthy, emotional films. When The Shrouds is released this Spring, there will hopefully be a handful of young Guadagnino heads in the crowd, drawn to Cronenberg’s work and finding the sinewy, raw strands that connect this world to the one they know so well.