David Cronenberg channels the death of his wife for his most tender and emotional movie yet

In The Shrouds, the new movie from David Cronenberg, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday, a widower played by Vincent Cassell invents a new ultrasound-like technology so he can check in on his late wife in her grave. He logs in – much in the same way we might check our Ring app – to monitor her body as it slowly decomposes, finding comfort in the livestreamed images of her decaying flesh.

Only in a Cronenberg movie would that premise feel like a natural, even sentimental, progression. His work often explores how the body merges with technology. Think about the VHS tape entering the torso in Videodrome, the organic pistol that fires enamel in eXistenZ or the way his camera tends to invade the human anatomy in pretty much all his work. It's no surprise then that technology would follow the body into death and beyond in Cronenberg's most tender, vulnerable and emotional movie yet.

Cronenberg is drawing from the loss of his own wife of 43 years, channeling his prolonged grief as she battled cancer into a story that also deals with the latest evolution in technology and modern geopolitical warfare. At one point Vincent Cassel's Karsh, whose white hair and dark suits (not to mention the actor's elongated face) makes him a dead ringer for Cronenberg, expresses the same urge that the filmmaker once described in an interview, an impulse to crawl into his wife's coffin because he couldn't bear the thought of leaving her to be alone in death.

"It is my most autobiographical film but it's not really autobiography," Cronenberg told the gathered journalists at a press conference in Cannes, the day after The Shrouds premiered in competition. 

Cronenberg, a long-standing Cannes darling, is part of a huge Canadian delegation at the festival that also includes Winnipeg's Guy Maddin and Matthew Rankin, short filmmakers Alison McAlpine and Tamara Mariam Dawit and some of the producers behind The Apprentice, a so-so bio on Donald Trump's rise to infamy in the '80s under the vampiric tutelage of lawyer Roy Cohn.

At the press conference, I'm marvelling at how Cronenberg can speak about his pain and vulnerability with such composure, perhaps with the same analytical distance that he brings to his filmmaking. His tone is warm and compassionate, but also clinical. The depth of his feelings never gets in the way of his curiosity about the human condition, nor his ability to express it.

That distance can be confused as cold, not just at the press conference but in the movie. Some reviews out of Cannes have called The Shrouds exactly that. I can't relate. There are wrenching moments here I simply can't shake — among Cronenberg's most powerfully haunting — like a surreal dream sequence when Cassel's Karsh remembers trying to make love to his wife (Diane Kruger, in one of her three roles). Her bones are so fragile that they can (and do) break on contact. The affection, pain and longing in that moment lingers long after.

Cronenberg took aim at some of The Shrouds reviews at the press conference, specifically the ones that dismiss the movie's turn towards conspiracy theories.

"Some reviewers — very ignorant, stupid ones — are thinking that the whole conspiracy aspect of the film — the paranoia and stuff — has nothing to do with the love story and the grief," says Cronenberg, perhaps referencing write-ups on blogs like AwardsWatch.com or NextBestPicture. "It means they completely did not understand the film."

In The Shrouds, the plot kicks in when Karsh's GraveTech — as his livestream from six feet below is called — is sabotaged and potentially hacked. Karsh has business partners who worry that the Chinese government may be behind the privacy breach, attempting to surveil and weaponize grief, much in the same way photos of our most cherished memories and loved ones on social media are mined as data for who knows what purposes. 

At the same time, Karsh and his sister-in-law (also Kruger) are wary that his wife's death wasn't simply cancer but the result of experimental work that a nefarious health care system and crooked doctors put her through. The Shrouds starts running out of gas near the end, as Karsh tries to get the bottom of these conspiracy theories, but the tangled web of ideas are never short of intriguing.

"Conspiracy theory is a grief strategy," says Cronenberg, spelling out how his characters latch on to their suspicions as a way to impose meaning on their loss. "If you're an atheist, like I am, and you don't believe in an afterlife, then the death of someone you love is meaningless. It has no meaning. Why did it happen? Why did it happen now? Why wasn't it somebody else who died instead? And it's very difficult for people to live with no meaning."

"It empowers you to have knowledge of a conspiracy," Cronenberg continues. "I think you can see that in the politics of today, with all the very, very inventive crazy, conspiracy theories. It's giving people a voice and a sense of importance. The same can be true of a grief conspiracy."

Paranoia about technology happens to be connective tissue throughout Cronenberg's films, from the invasive tech in Scanners to the unnerving AI assistant in The Shrouds (the third character played by Kruger). But while so many in the film industry are feeling that same sense of impending doom and suspicion over AI, Cronenberg, perhaps unsurprisingly, is relatively calm, even clinical, about it. Embracing that which we fear is perhaps his most recognizable trademark. 

The director speaks about how incredibly useful a tool AI can be, in the same way as CGI has, while also acknowledging the jobs under threat by its advances.

"Do we welcome that," he asks. "Do we fear that? Both. It's like nuclear fission. It's ferocious and terrifying and it's also incredibly useful."