Hello, Darkness

David Cronenberg is back with a sexy new techno drama that doubles as a romantic tribute to his late wife. A conversation with the Baron of Blood

- COURTNEY SHEA

You’re heralded as a pioneer of body horror. Do you consider your latest film, The Shrouds, a member of that genre?

It seems more like a romance to me. “Body horror” is a term someone else invented to describe my work. I accept it, but genre isn’t something I think about. Some people have called The Shrouds science fiction, but all the tech we show, including the tech for the shrouds themselves, exists today. I think of the movie as something of a drama.

In it, a start-up invents a high-tech burial shroud that allows the living to monitor their loved ones’ corpses. Where did that idea come from?

It’s inspired by my experience of losing my wife, Carolyn, to cancer in 2017. In my film, the character Karsh, a tech-nerd entrepreneur played by Vincent Cassel, manufactures these shrouds to deal with a similar crisis. He has this instinct to climb into his wife’s coffin, because he can’t bear to be separated from her. So his solution is to join her via tech. I performed my own version of that by making this movie.

Karsh also says that, as an atheist, he can’t take comfort in religious grieving rituals. I assume you're the same.