I can't wait to plunge into the enigmas of THE SHROUDS.
Another day, another lackluster reception to a highly anticipated Cannes title. Ali Abbasi's Donald Trump film, The Apprentice, seems neither thrilling nor especially deep, with various comparisons to Wikipedia entries throughout naysayer's reviews. At least, its cast got general praise, with highest honors to Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn. Then again, it did receive one of the festival's longest standing ovations yet, so make of that what you will. On a more somber note, David Cronenberg's The Shrouds is being described as the director's most transparent movie, laying bare the grief of an artist dealing with his wife's passing. In a recent interview, the Canadian master described cinema as a cemetery, and it seems his latest work follows that idea to literal ends.
For the Cannes at Home odyssey, let's examine two horrors from the directors' past - Abbasi's Shelley and Cronenberg's Videodrome, where a very different vision of death awaits…
SHELLEY (2016) Ali Abbasi
Born and raised in Iran, Ali Abbasi immigrated to Sweden to study at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology. Later, as his interests drifted from architecture to other arts, he attended the National Film School of Denmark and has lived there since. This country-hopping biography is prologue to a cinema that's as prone to migration across borders, idioms, and genres. His early shorts oscillated between modes of expression, though they seemed to settle in an obsession with authority figures. From there, he made his feature debut in Denmark before reaching international recognition with the unclassifiable Swedish fairytale that is Border. Next came the Jordan-shot Iran-set true crime thriller Holy Spider, and now Abbasi has gone all the way to America for a biopic.
Having already written about Border and Holy Spider, this seems like an opportune moment to go back to the start – to Shelley, Abbasi's feature debut. Like Rosemary's Baby, Alien, and other iconic frights, the film belongs to a tradition of pregnancy-based horror where the creation of life is examined in all its anxieties and biological stresses, enhanced through cinematic imaginings until the end of the world could be contained within the body with child. But Abbasi's film isn't interested in the more gruesome manifestations of these nightmares, showing unusual contention and minimum viscera that can read as prudent, even elegant, or outright cowardly depending on where you fall in the splatter scale. Should you be a gore-hound, Shelley can be too clean.
Instead of outright body horror, the director focuses on the potential psychological terror of surrogacy. Shelley centers on Elena, a Romanian woman seeking work in Denmark, hoping to sustain herself and her son in a new country and get a place to call her own. That's how she ends up employed by Louise and Kasper, an eccentric couple who live far away from civilization and without electricity, away from the perceived vices of our modern world. More than a straightforward monster movie, Shelley plays with a sense of isolation, how it's a choice for some and an imposition to others, weaving a tapestry of class differences from that initial tension. The power imbalance between the two women is the linchpin of the exercise, putting a great deal of responsibility on its actresses' shoulders.
Thankfully, they're up for it, working different registers that contrast and complement each other. As Elena, Cosmina Stratan is an earthy presence with emotions clearly seen on an expressive face. For the first half of Shelley, she grounds the picture, destabilizing the audience when the perspective inverts in favor of Ellen Dorrit Petersen's Louise. A figure of ethereal mystery, the Danish woman takes POV duties just as Stratan slips from our grasp, becoming an abstraction, a martyrized body under the strain of pregnancy, and maybe something more sinister. One would-be mother's despair colors our perception of the other's suffering, as if defying the audience to manage their empathy, what allegiance they'll take in the tale, and whether one woman is necessarily right and the other wrong. Facing the unknown, anything's possible.
Yet, Abbasi's strengths don't lie in psychological portraiture. While the actresses work their best, the text is a tad anemic. For example, it leaves a crucial character so undefined that their eleventh-hour fate feels rushed, a hollow demise right in the middle of Shelley's climax. Abbasi is better equipped to invoke complex variations of dread through photography and sound, bringing the natural world to the forefront in ways that can become intrusive to the human element. One feels the pressure from outside, how the atmosphere seems to vibrate and drive people mad. Some dialogue refers to unspeakable wrongness, which would be nothing but portentous nonsense in the hands of a lesser director. With Abbasi in charge, it's viscerally felt. Even if nothing terrible happens, you'll sense its potential chilling the spine, sparking unease in nerves like livewire.
Shelley is available to rent and purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube, and the Microsoft Store.
VIDEODROME (1983) David Cronenberg
A man kneels before his TV, on which the image of a mouth asks him to come closer, come to her. The machine becomes biological in its call, veins protruding from a plastic skin. It swells with lust, with hunger, and so does its victim. He goes closer, goes in, willingly eaten by the screen as his hands fondle the undulating membrane that was once hard glass. Give or take a wet clay wall, this is Videodrome's most iconic image, the one you'll see on posters and promo material. It's understandably popular, so striking that it immediately captures you like the TV swallows its human prey. It speaks to you, doesn't it? In a society gorging itself on stimulation, overcharged and overwhelmed, striking images always do. This one invites obsession and beckons attachment, its mysteries like a shiny bait hiding a fishhook. And just like that, you're caught.
Apologies for the lunatic text, but writing about Videodrome feels like penning a gospel for a forbidden faith. Describing the film in its narrative terms is futile, and engaging its ideas is the path to some marvelous madness. Even so, I'll try. Let's start with the basics – James Woods stars as Max Renn, the president of a Toronto-based TV channel specializing in sensationalist shows. The actor is perfect for playing this purveyor of sleaze, a merchant of filth, holding a resting expression that's made of oily self-satisfaction. He's also an awful good Alice for Cronenberg to guide through the looking glass, starting his journey with shocking footage that looks like an avant-garde snuff film. Videodrome is the name of the program and its curse, prompting Renn to have hallucinations and macabre bodily changes. Think gashes and phallic guns emerging from melted hands.
Still, despite their unsettling nature, the imagery in this and all Cronenberg horrors is oddly beautiful. That's because, in its foremost essence, the nightmare is erotic. Because there's nothing more erotic than death. Because annihilation is generative, and death is creation. Because everything is about sex, except death, which is sex. And since the orgasm is the little death, one must presume the ultimate sex is death in its most inescapable form. Holy destruction, enrapture us in your delirium. Don't believe me? Just ask Videodrome's second most important character, played by Debbie Harry. She's the movies' most entrancing masochist this side of Fassbinder, is beyond eager. And like her director, she's oh-so-willing to prod the body's capacity for pain as a conduit to pleasure.
But where is the limit of bodies? Is there one?
All roads lead to Rome, and every idea presented in a Cronenbergian horror leads back to the profane sacrosanctity of the body, its endless possibilities. Though he was getting there all along, Videodrome feels like the first work where the director embraced body and mind as married concepts, one and the same and all that can mean. Even in terms of mutability, they're bound together. The body is malleable, impermanent, defined by its transitory properties rather than the stability so many other artists find within it. As for the mind, consider the power of an idea. That spark of thought can transform the carnal organism, reality itself. And through the body, what's inside the psyche comes out into the world. Every inch of flesh, every pore, is a transmogrification machine that turns the ineffable into the tactile.
Of course, the marriage of body and mind isn't always a smooth union. Often, it's full of quarreling, with one trying to assert dominance over the other. It's especially intense when foreign agents intercede on one behalf – like technology. That man-made miracle alters us, a theme present in most Cronenberg films up to the new Crimes of the Future and the even newer Shrouds. But the director, for all that he has shown us Humanity mutated and ravaged, maintains an openness to it. When many filmmakers cloister themselves in nostalgia, drunk on the certainty that things were better before, the Canadian master looks forward with glee. Only the tyranny some shady figures may want to implement through technology is rejected. Never technology itself.
Indeed, at its most ecstatic, Videodrome shows how technology can become a third in the marriage for a ménage-like next step in human evolution. This hybrid, at the end of it all, is the closest there is to holiness in Cronenberg's godless cinema. These are loopy considerations that might have seemed removed from reality once upon a time but have become increasingly urgent. After all, have you seen the news? We live in a moment of chips in people's brains, Neuralink advancements and capital's technocratic imposition over all. The nightmare cum wet dream of Videodrome is looking less and less like fiction. How long until we merge with technology? How long until we reject the old and welcome the new now, the next? Long live the new flesh!
It's amazing how many ideas Cronenberg can fit into less than 90 minutes. Even if one gets lost in its concepts, the mantra-like words and knotted meanings, its power is undeniable. Moreover, the material has a polysemic quality that lets it escape more judgmental interpretations. Even a straightforward moralistic reading like "violent imagery turns you violent" can't be sustained by the fact of Videodrome, where every moral dictum is vivisected and contradicted. The irony of Kenn's hallucinations is that they are of his own making. The effect of the transmission remains, regardless of what is transmitted, depicted, exposed. Going further, still, another message like "watching TV changes you" is subverted by Cronenberg's rejoicing over change. In his hands, we see beyond morality. And beyond morality, there’s awe.
Sorry if I lost my head up my own chest vagina. Videodrome does that to a person.
Videodrome is available to rent and purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, YouTube, and the Microsoft Store.
Do you prefer Cronenberg as a sommelier of shock or a sorrowful elder statesman? And what do you make of Abbasi's strange career, from horror to BiopicLand?