THRILLER; 1hr 59min
STARRING: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce
Grave danger: Cassel (foreground) and Pearce
In the opening image of writer-director David Cronenberg’s intimate take on the anomalies of grief, Vincent Cassel’s Karsh screams in anguish at the sight of his distinctly dead wife, Becca (Kruger). Cut to a close-up of Karsh’s own horror-mask mouth, now seated snugly in a dentist’s chair. “Grief is rotting your teeth,” the dentist informs him. Of course it is! Welcome to Cronenberg Country.
Karsh is a versatile guy: a restaurateur, a “producer of industrial videos” and part-owner of The Shrouds cemetery, in which said restaurant is located, because why wouldn’t it be. The Shrouds isn’t any old cemetery, needless to say, being that its headstones are equipped with app-activated screens that deliver 3D images of pristinely rendered decaying bodies, shrouded for that very purpose in their graves. But when the cemetery is vandalised by hackers, its grave data is encrypted, leaving Karsh and his presumably wackadoodle clients locked out of their streamlined creep-shows.
The resourceful Karsh promptly summons his squirrelly programmer brother-in-law, Maury (Pearce, thanklessly scrambling), to unlock the mystery of what the hell could have happened. Meanwhile, Karsh attempts via his perky AI assistant and Becca-lookalike, Hunny (Kruger again), to track down Becca’s oncologist and former lover, who is currently missing in Iceland, where the hackers appear to be based. For his part, Maury is baffled by the whole unhinged deal. In fairness, who wouldn’t be? Is the hacking part of a bigger surveillance picture? And does that really matter?
The line between horror and hyperbole is membrane-thin, regardless of how assuredly you walk it. As a loner for whom consumption equals control, Cassel’s wolfish aloofness is an asset at every measured step of gloom-sunk Cronenbergian strangeness. His sangfroid in the face of insanity dips this verbose trip by a nose into the depths of trauma it’s shooting for.
