Kritiken

The Shrouds may see a great filmmaker in a more settled frame of mind, but that doesn’t mean that his inner provocateur is dormant, as he’s still clearly willing to dive headfirst into the depths of twisted human desire.

The Shrouds can feel a bit more room-bound, talky, and less concerned with a kind of transformative dynamism than other works by Cronenberg. These aren’t shortcomings, but reflections in a natural shifting of filmmaking energies (in a manner some critics have already described as a “late style”).

My first reaction was that The Shrouds is an engaging if underwhelming addition to Cronenberg’s filmography. I still miss some of the gloss of his earlier works... Yet, as I’ve let it sink in, or let it rot away in my brain if you’d like, The Shrouds’ richer aspects have been revealed.

[The Shrouds] offers just about enough resonance, style, and humor to forgive its knotted narrative and inconsequential loose ends... That said, for a meditation on death, grief, cancer, and libido, The Shrouds is funnier than expected... and when it comes to that eerily clean aesthetic, the master remains hard to beat.

The Shrouds certainly boasts a terrific premise. But it is indeed a day to grieve when the most shocking thing about a David Cronenberg film is how dull it is... Its sly irony is muffled by a convoluted, fatally tedious plot.

“The Shrouds” gets funnier and funnier as it goes on... It is disjointed, yes, but never dull and quite magnificent to watch unravel... “The Shrouds” feels like one of the greatest encapsulations of loss and one we might look at more and more fondly as time goes by.

Even as its main story leaves much to be desired, Cronenberg remains such a unique craftsman, excelling in world-building and atmosphere that The Shrouds is still worth looking into for fans of the bizarre.

It’s a film of bold ideas and moments of terrific atmosphere and visual power, but those strengths are often neutered by a lack of storytelling precision, with various strands coming and going. Yet for its faults, you can’t escape the late-career, and late-life, honesty here: you can feel the madness of loss running through it.

A quintessentially late film from an artist who’s always been ahead of his time, “The Shrouds” is Cronenberg at his most inhospitable... And yet, as with so many of Cronenberg’s most resonant movies, its morgue-like coldness eventually reveals itself to be deeply comforting to some degree — if not while you’re watching it, then perhaps as its big ideas begin to seep into your bone marrow during the days and weeks that follow.

[The Shrouds] is intriguing and exhausting: a quasi-murder mystery and doppelganger sex drama combined with a sci-fi conspiracy thriller which comes very close to participating in that very xenophobia it purports to satirise... Yet for all this, the film has its own creepy, enveloping mausoleum atmosphere of disquiet, helped by the jarring electronic score by Howard Shore.

Unfortunately, The Shrouds, for all the many ideas floating around in it, feels more like a series of interesting notes for a film than an actual feature... None of it really fits together. And most of it... is talk, delivered with such obviousness that the artistry is absent.

The Shrouds has potential to be morbidly hilarious, deeply twisted and strange, or rather moving: the fact that it only feints in those directions, while prioritising several less fruitful ones, makes it the steepest disappointment of Cronenberg’s late career.