In David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds , emotions manifest themselves through changes to the body. A man bleeds because he’s nervous. Grief rots the teeth.
And love, in one of the film’s more startling images, seems to mimic the effects of a late-stage terminal disease. There is talk of religion, but the film’s protagonist, Vincent Cassel’s Karsh Relikh, made up to look like Cronenberg himself, insists that he’s an atheist. But he does believe in an afterlife.
Or, maybe more accurately, an afterdeath: Karsh has developed a technology that will allow him to watch his beloved late wife’s body decay in the grave, and he wants to share it with the world. That’s the “shroud” of the title: a nifty piece of engineered cloth outfitted with many tiny X-ray cameras that is placed in the deceased’s coffin, allowing their loved ones to watch them slowly rot away. It was born out of Karsh’s anguished desire to enter his wife Bekka’s (Diane Kruger) coffin and be buried alongside her, but now it’s part of his funereal tech empire.
Someone asks him about the Shroud of Turin early on; he reminds them that the ancient relic that purported to capture the face of Jesus was a fake. But Relikh’s shrouds are real. As someone who doesn’t believe in a spiritual concept of the self, maybe this is his answer to religion: If our emotions are our bodies, then perhaps, in watching our bodies decompose, we can truly reveal a secular version of the soul.
The Shrouds is clearly a v.