[Seen as part of the Overlook Film Festival]
To meditate upon mortality is a timeless practice. To die in life, to live in death; contemplation of the skull. Modern American burial practices are largely sterilized by capitalism, removing from family members proximity to mourning, specifically the body, and thusly the reminders of our own mortality. In its place, a fetishization of gestures filling a void where once the rituals of dealing with our eternal nature stood. We dwell in fabricated meanings and loose sight of essential truths, lose connection with our selves, and each other.
I have heard endlessly the phrase “this is Cronenberg’s most personal film” as the PR campaigns tend to regurgitate a touchstone of justification for whats about to be seen. I cannot help but feel this neuters its truth. It feels like it pitches the film as an act of mourning, but the film is not a piece of theater as therapy. True, Cronenberg has experienced loss, a real and personal loss. The film however does not exist in the realm of the mourner, it exists in the realm of the artist.
Crafting from the cthonic rite, “The Shrouds” is a true catabasis. Cronenberg reaching into the earth, to find meaning and reason in the entropy of all things. How we die in life, dissociating and distracting ourselves. Building complex puzzles which separate us from the truth of the flesh. All things fade. But our obsession with meaning, with value, with some sense of importance is only an attempt to stave off death. A perversion of our truest nature.
Cronenberg is king here. An exemplary showcase of craft. Cold and meticulous in equal parts to its grotesque implications. In full dialogue with its lineage of the libidinous body in revolt, The Shrouds plays upon the iconography of a life’s work and what it might amount to. What ghosts are left in the void of a once luminous life? Perhaps it is the best work of our lives.
