funerals

The Shrouds (2025)

/ swampflix / 5 Comments

Grief has been the major theme of horror cinema for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought.  Only David Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.
Vincent Cassel stars in The Shrouds as a David Cronenberg type: a silver-haired Torontonian millionaire named Karsh, whose grief over the recent passing of his wife has made it impossible to enjoy his life’s refinement & luxury. Only, that onscreen avatar has fully given into the modern evils that have tormented Cronenberg’s consciousness throughout his career as a public figure: the menacing intersection of technology & sex. Karsh drives around a near-future Toronto in his Tesla-brand electric car, enjoying the occasional indulgence in fine-dining extravagance while mostly spending his alone time obsessing over digital images of his dead wife. His most intimate relationship is with a cartoon A.I. assistant named Honey, and he’s struggling to suppress his sexual desire for his wife’s surviving sister — both of whom are played by Diane Kruger, the same actor who represents his wife in memories & photographs. If I were to therapize what the director is doing with Cassel’s aimlessly selfish protagonist, I’d say he’s confronting the worst-faith version of himself as a way of processing the real-life loss of his own wife. None of that is really my or anybody else’s business, though, and it’s just as likely he’s satirizing a societal malady as he is expressing a personal one.

Conceptually, The Shrouds is designed to question the fetishism & alien rituals of how we grieve our loved ones, calling attention to them in the same way that the sensation of our tongues being housed inside our own mouths doesn’t feel bizarre until the moment their presence is singled out. If it’s socially acceptable for Karsh to eroticize and mourn the loss of his wife’s physical body, how specific is he allowed to be?  If it’s romantic to miss touching his favorite of her breasts, then what is so strange about eroticizing & mourning her teeth? Would it be any stranger for him to browse .jpegs of his wife’s dental scans than it would to occasionally flip through her nude Polaroids? If all he has to remember her by is images of her body while she was still alive, would it be so strange to extend that keepsake collection to images of her body in death? Neither set of images represents her, exactly. They’re just records of the physical traits that housed her essence, which left the flesh as soon as she passed. And what of the ritual where a surviving spouse plans & purchases their funeral-lot burial directly next to their deceased lover for whenever they happen to die themselves? Why wait until death to join your spouse in your shared marital cemetery bed? What if you could stay with them every minute until your own body expires, through the portable convenience of a smartphone app?

Cassel’s Karsh is a tech-bro innovator who has disrupted the funeral service game by investing in technology that allows you to connect with your deceased loved one’s grave at any time, via app. You no longer have to fight the impulse to jump into the coffin to be buried with them, not since there are live 3D images of their corpse rotting in real time, thanks to the visual sensors of the titular future-tech shrouds. That lingering impulse to stick by his wife after her body expires commands what’s left of his erotic life: his growing tensions with the wife’s conspiracy-theorist sister, his uncomfortably flirtatious relationship with his A.I. digital assistant, and his nightly visits from the ghostly memory of his wife in declining health, which he remembers as a series of experimental surgeries he considers a form of medical adultery. Cut off from physical access to his wife’s body, he looks for its closest surviving substitutes and finds only terror, alienation, and betrayal in the pursuit. Meanwhile, the proof-of-concept graveyard showroom for his shrouds tech is vandalized, while international protestors threaten to take down his entire personal empire in a far-reaching conspiracy of circular logic & capitalist sin.

There’s no dramatic resolution or clarifying statement that ties all of these cold, alienating concepts together. Expressing unease with how technology & sex are integrated into the grief process is the entire point of the project, so it would be self-defeating to alleviate any of it. Instead, Karsh becomes increasingly paranoid & isolated in his quest to reclaim his wife’s body as a physical presence in his life, despite the impossibility of that happening, as she is dead & buried before the movie begins. The seemingly conspiratorial efforts to keep him separated from that body are their own source of erotic terror rather than a source of narrative structure, which makes for just about the strangest way this story could possibly be told. It’s a cold, philosophical rumination on the inhumanity of modern living — one that prompts you to laugh at the deadpan absurdity of its delivery before you realize just how chilling you find the implications of its bigger-picture ideas. In other words, it’s a David Cronenberg film.

-Brandon Ledet

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

In the opening scene of Rungano Nyoni’s On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, a young woman dressed as Missy “Supa Dupa Fly” Elliott drives alone on an unlit Zambian highway, abruptly pausing to inspect a dead body in the road.  Remaining in costume, she makes several nonchalant phone calls to family, notifying them that she has discovered the corpse of her Uncle Fred.  No one seems to be in a particular rush to help, and she’s reluctantly roped into the petty concerns of her party-drunk father, her more belligerently drunk cousin, her absent mother, and a police force that can’t arrive until morning because their one vehicle is already in use.  It’s only after Uncle Fred is scooped off the road in the morning hours that she can finally take off her comically oversized Missy Elliott costume and return to her regular self as the prodigal urbanite daughter, Shula (Susan Chardy).  Uncle Fred is also stripped of his costume in those daylight hours, as the sins of his living days are revealed by stripping away the respectability afforded to all corpses at their own funeral.  We quickly understand why Shula met Uncle Fred’s death with such an icy, deadpan detachment, and by then the joke isn’t funny anymore.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl starts on a sharp streak of morbid humor, then gets increasingly nauseating the deeper it digs into the Patriarchal sins it unearths, which is also how I remember Nyoni’s debut, I Am Not a Witch.  It’s a film about the value of a whisper network, likening its titular bird’s usefulness on African savannahs as a warning-signal for nearby animals that a predator is approaching to women who warn each other of a nearby sexual predator’s potential to harm.  The problem, of course, is that guinea fowl’s usefulness to other animals does little to save their own hides, as they presumably squawk their way into being eaten while everyone else scurries away.  We come to learn that Uncle Fred left many victims in his wake, notoriously preying on underage girls in his family & community with no consequences, since the advice his victims are given by their matron elders is “Don’t think about it, and don’t talk about it.”  There’s no real way to hold the now-dead man accountable, but Shula becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that his crimes against his own people should go undiscussed, and she subtly, gradually takes on the behaviors of a guinea fowl the longer his sham of a funeral drags on.  Maybe she can be a useful warning to others about the dangers of men like Fred; or maybe her animal noises of protest will only separate her out as a target for more cruelty.

Besides the gender politics of Shula’s quiet resistance to her family’s loving memory of Uncle Fred, Guinea Fowl is most engaging as an alienating look at Zambian funeral rituals.  Every aspect of Uncle Fred’s days-long funeral is seemingly designed to trigger Shula: her required presence, the women’s critique of each other’s crying techniques, the men outside who drink beer in wait of the women in the home to feed them after they perform the labor of mourning, the world-class victim-blaming of Uncle Fred’s teenage widow for failing to keep him alive, etc.  Meanwhile, Shula’s relationship with reality unravels as she dissociates from the absurd celebration of such a wicked man.  Her dreams & memories become increasingly intrusive, interrupting the flow of the narrative with images of her younger self observing Uncle Fred’s body, images of that body resurrected and covered in maxi pads, and vintage 1990s broadcasts of children’s television shows detailing the natural behaviors of the guinea fowl.  Those intrusions call into question the real-world credibility of other details like the floodwater floors of a local university or the music-video pool party atmosphere of the local library.  The film never fully tips into the fantasy realm, though; it just precariously teeters on the edge between worlds as Shula calculates what to do with her voice as one of Uncle Fred’s surviving victims.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl locally premiered at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival, where it was initially met with the soft laughter of recognition until the room went coldly silent the more we all realized what kind of story we were watching.  It’s an especially tough watch if you belong to a family that stubbornly ignores its worst members’ most heinous crimes for the sake of social politeness, which I assume accounts for just about everyone.  And if it doesn’t, please know that I am jealous. 

-Brandon Ledet