This is not a review.
About a month ago, I saw The Shrouds (2024) in the cinema for the first time. After ruminating on it, posting a quick review to Letterboxd and eating some very mediocre sushi, I found myself, periodically crying throughout the rest of the evening and well into the early hours of the morning. This, unfortunately, ruined the unintentional double feature I did with Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (2024), a film I remember very little about, but have the vague sense that I did, in fact, like it. It wasn't for the lack of quality that the details of this fluffy little movie slipped away, but rather due to me having what I will euphemistically call a 'bad turn'.
I do spiral. I've been known to dwell. I've sunk to depths of depression that I didn't think I was capabale of. I've been triggered by the innocuous and I've been triggered by the terrifying. I've spaced out for days and been knocked back to reality by something as mundane as a very, very good sandwich. I'm used to it. I've been through the ringer. Nothing in this realm is new to me.
And still, this reaction felt very extreme, either through raised expecations or lack of them. What happened did feel unwarranted, invasive. A reaction severe even for someone without a firm grasp on emotional regulation.
David Cronenberg is an important director to me. His relationship to time, to the body, to creation, to destruction and to maligned desire has been formative, not only in the ways I've come to navigate filmic analysis but also through various enigmatic emotional states. In some ways, his worlds are easy to identify with, specifically because of the absurd interpretation of the normative - how disabled people are transformed into pure conduits for technological desire in Crash (1996), how the creative process is warped by committee in eXistenZ (1999), how the brain merges effortlessly with the new-fangled gadget known as television in Videodrome (1983). Nothing is normal, and yet the worlds are translated to the audience through sheer confidence, subjectivity at its most steady.
The Shrouds has been described as intensely personal, with Cronenberg himself characterising it as an intepretation of grief after the death of his wife, whilst at the same time retaining the free-wheeling directorial style of a filmmaker who has a vast catalogue of work behind him. This is not to say that what we get with this movie is any more experimental than other entries in his filmography but that there is a remarkable lack of concern for the wants of the audience, refreshing in a film climate intent on appealing to the least engaged person, the lowest common denominator. It's refreshing to watch something and know that it was made for them and anyone else who is willing to get on board.
Karsh is always watching his wife's body. It seems as though his business was built for this specific purpose. She is both frozen in time and perpetually rotting. It's sentimental objectification and it translates to the world, seeping into the alive women in his life. The blind wife of a dying man has her face. His sister-in-law has her breasts. She can't die. The pain of release is selfish and personal. He is constantly edging, trapped by a world of technology closing in around him.
When my nan died, I didn't really react. Getting my emotions on the outside is very hard for me. I've used this blog many times to process difficult feelings I've had, and in recent years, I've transferred this process onto the movies I watch, the flickering eye of abject emotion, the constant taboo. The last time I held my nan's hand in the hospital, it wasn't for long enough. I should have said more and I didn't.
Karsh is haunted by an AI apparition called Hunny who serves as his virtual assistant. She is an icy-voiced, too-slick culmination of data mined for the purpose of entrancing him. Observing his life as he watches his wife's corpse disintegrate. All affection is replaceable and it will be sold to you.
I began a project in the year or so after my nan died of typing up the letters she wrote me my first year of university. At first, it was because I was terrified that they would be lost or ruined to time, the ink faded, the paper creasing to become illegile, but then I got the idea to give these typed-up letters as a present to my mother, who had lost both her parents within five years of each other. As I completed this, I realised there was very little to give. Whatever depth I had found in the process of typing them had not materialised in the various word documents. The mundanity of their contents was charming but not gift-worthy. They mostly served as evidence of her rapidly deteriorating mind, leaving her in the blur of dementia with very little outlet. I didn't know my nan as a person. She belonged to the family memory and nowhere else. The letters revealed nothing.
Karsh's main goals are to bolster and establish his grave viewing venture as a legitimate technological advance, and to penetrate his grief-stricken asexuality with actual human touch. As you can assume, these goals are antithetical one another and the hypocrisy is very much the point. The engulfing loneliness of grief being outsourced to automation will not aid in the base desire to cling to human skin, as true orgasm is a reminder that your flesh is malleable and belongs to the world. The screen cannot save Karsh. Only people can.
I've never been good at people. And I suspect, though they would never admit it so as not to appear sincere or weak, that many members of my family struggle to interpret how they relate to other people as well. My nan's death was spoken about in practical terms, like funeral arrangements and the outcome of her will, but I can't say I gleaned much about how they felt beyond expressions of resentment, which I tend to interpret as sadness with nowhere to go, with no language to attach itself to. In the past couple of years, I have had my mother express her interpretation of growing up with an alcholic who was physically present but wasn't really there. How her experience working as a carer in retirement homes and caring for her disabled mother were not very different.
I can't help being sad about the parts of the people I love that I will never know. How I have to suspend them in my mind forever in the hopes that some of their actions may make sense, that their innermost thoughts will reveal themselves in a dream or delusion. That maybe one day, with the power of techology, I could speak to an automated version of my mother's mother. And what a horrific and unsatisfying day that would be.
I have an intense, personal relationship to cinema. As much as I want to remain theoretical, keep my distance, acknowledge collaboration, and separate the art from the artist, I simply cannot make myself detach in this way. It has become a language for me, something burrowing and hysterical. I have continuously used this medium to process the feelings I have about myself and the relationship I have to being alive in this current moment. It often makes me a bad writer, not because I don't believe I'm unskilled, but because of how much I struggle to wrench a strong feeling towards something that barely scratched my surface. How could I possibly write for money when my output is simply not quick enough?
I think I will grieve forever and wonder forever about what I could be doing to participate more in life, to make myself a rounded memory in the other people's minds. I can't cope with the fact that I don't know people and they don't know me. I want to break into people's houses and learn all their secrets, understand their sadness, soak myself in their happiness and treat misgivings with compassion. It's a fool's game, I think. I will never be as omnipotent as I believe I should be.
This is not a review.