How David Cronenberg channeled very real grief into his new horror film, ‘The Shrouds,’ now at TIFF

David Cronenberg knows a lot about psychoanalysis. His 2011 movie “A Dangerous Method” ripped open the rivalry between early practitioners Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
This doesn’t mean, however, the Toronto filmmaker is inclined to put himself on the couch, even though his new film, “The Shrouds,” which is having its North American premiere this week at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, digs into his life and mind more deeply than any previous work.
He doesn’t want his graveyard-set creation, born out of the grief he experienced over the 2017 loss of his wife, Carolyn, to be seen as personal catharsis or closure.
“I’ve never thought of art as therapy,” said Cronenberg, 81.
“Even in this moment where you might think it could be, it isn’t. Making the movie doesn’t lessen the grief. And that doesn’t surprise me — I didn’t expect that it would.”
He was speaking in an interview during the Cannes Film Festival in May, where “The Shrouds” had its world premiere in competition for the Palme d’Or. (Sean Baker’s “Anora,” also at TIFF, ultimately won the prize.)
Cronenberg’s point is taken, although “The Shrouds” features a snowy-haired and smartly attired protagonist named Karsh, played by Vincent Cassel and looking a lot like a younger David Cronenberg.
Karsh has built a high-tech graveyard, called the Shrouds at GraveTech, that allows him to observe the decomposition of his beloved late wife Becca (Diane Kruger).
This couldn’t possibly be just another movie to Cronenberg, although it strikes many of the same notes of sci-fi prophecy and body horror as such previous films of his as “Crimes of the Future,” “Videodrome” and “Rabid.”
What did he anticipate going into it?
“I thought that it would induce me to investigate some aspects of a relationship and of death and of burial,” Cronenberg said. “All those things, I was thinking of them anyway, but this forced me to give it a dramatic shape. Beyond that, the creative act is its own reward, you know? It feels good, no matter what the subject matter. It feels satisfying.
“It’s a perversion of art, I guess.”

The writer-director was speaking on a hotel terrace overlooking the Boulevard de la Croisette, the waterfront promenade where he’s mobbed by fans whenever he goes for a stroll. Cronenberg is well known in Cannes: “The Shrouds” was his seventh film to compete for the Palme, the most by any Canadian in the fest’s 77-year history.
It was a sunny day for the interview and Cronenberg was smiling, even though he was dressed all in black and the topic was quite literally funereal.
Accurately described by Kruger as Cronenberg’s “most personal film” in his long career, “The Shrouds” is also arguably his best. It intimately explores the director’s fascination with corporeal horror, advanced science and high paranoia in ways that genuinely touch the heart — and prompt the occasional wry chuckle, with some of the gallows humour that often arises in Cronenberg movies.
Cassel’s Karsh, an inventor and entrepreneur so focused on his work he fails to realize how gruesome he appears to others, takes a date to lunch at the restaurant adjoining his wired cemetery. He shows her how mourners can treat death like a YouTube channel, watching their loved ones slowly disintegrate via a graveside screen or handy smartphone app.
“How dark are you willing to go?” Karsh asks his date (Jennifer Dale), who quickly heads for the exit when she realizes he isn’t kidding.
“She’s the audience surrogate,” Cronenberg said, acknowledging that many viewers will find the subject matter, which a character in the film refers to “corpse voyeurism,” grim.
The writer-director joked about aging and mortality at last weekend’s TIFF Tribute Awards, as he accepted the TIFF Norman Jewison Career Achievement Award, named for his friend and fellow filmmaker, who died earlier this year.
“I’m as old as Joe Biden!” Cronenberg cracked, as he received the prize from actor Viggo Mortensen, the filmmaker’s sometime leading man and a close friend. (For his part, Mortensen chided Hollywood denizens in the audience for having never yet given Cronenberg an Oscar.)
Despite the film’s moments of levity, Cronenberg’s grief over the death of his wife of nearly 40 years permeates every frame of “The Shrouds.” Through its genuine and sorrowful expression of mourning, the film seems a kind of tribute to Carolyn, albeit one that only her husband could have created.

“It absolutely is,” Cronenberg said. “I don’t think I would have made this movie under other circumstances. If she was still alive, I’d be doing something quite different.”

Kruger said she was honoured to play a character inspired by Cronenberg’s intense love for his late wife.
The German actor felt “invited into his intimacy,” in a complicated role that required considerable nudity and ghostly appearances where limbs and a breast are missing, the result of illness and amputation.
“Even when you see me in death, there’s something strangely beautiful about it,” said Kruger, in a separate interview on the same sunny terrace.
“Weirdly, in this film, I didn’t even find it to be like body horror, because it involves illness, right?” she said. “It didn’t feel like I was making a gory kind of thing, because I was still anchored in reality.”
Cassel also spoke of the unique experience of working on a Cronenberg movie, his third (he previously co-starred with Mortensen in “A Dangerous Method” and “Eastern Promises”).
“It’s never painful working with David,” the French actor said.
“He’s always very calm and very gentle. And actually, that’s maybe one thing I’ve tried to pick up from him, that gentle way of speaking.
“I told him at the end of this shoot, ‘I really appreciate and admire the elegance with which you handle your environment.’ He has a word for everybody and it’s real and genuine.”
Cassel smiled as he considered how much his character in “The Shrouds” looks like Cronenberg. It’s obvious to him, although Cronenberg insisted the resemblance isn’t that strong.
“Vincent really doesn’t look like me,” he said. “His head is shaved right now. If he had come to me that way, I still would have cast him. I never cast him because of his hair, you know.”
The director paused, and continued with a smile.
“But weirdly enough, out of the corner of your eye, we look somewhat similar. I think he was watching me, but (Karsh) is his own invention.”
Cronenberg similarly attaches scant importance to how Karsh also speaks like him: succinctly, calmly and authoritatively.
“I’m not thinking outside the film and what works in the film, and I don’t assume that anybody who sees it is going to know anything about me personally,” Cronenberg said.
“It doesn’t give me any moral credibility that some of these lines of dialogue might have been spoken by me in real life. That doesn’t help make the movie good, necessarily.” 
“The Shrouds” was supposed to be a Netflix series. But when the streamer backed out, Cronenberg opted to make a standalone feature. It doesn’t have the ending he’d envisioned for the series, or even one that can be fully explained.
“I never had a problem with open-ended films,” he said, “and I’ve never really felt that the craft demanded that the end of a film tie everything up and explain everything.
“That is never my understanding of art in the first place. So the fact that this (film) should have a sense that it could continue on is just good, legitimate, dramatic structure.”
With Cronenberg, no good idea ever dies, even one situated six feet under.
The Shrouds screens at TIFF on Sept. 11 and 12. Go to tiff.net for details.