TIFF '24: For the Dead and the Dying and Those Left Behind

by Cláudio Alves

Vincent Cassel and Guy pearce in David Cronenberg's THE SHROUDS.

All of us are on a long journey into death, set on a collision course with the great end that nothing can entirely prevent and no one can avoid forever. Artists are no different, mere mortals like the rest of us. However, the nature of their work means those persons' relationship with our collective finality may take unexpected forms, many of them public. Whether a creator wants it or not, when the finish line comes into conscious sight, their creation shall reflect it. Mortality subsumes the art, even when buried deep within layers of escapism, deflection, and delusion. The brave ones disregard such distractions and stare at the monster head-on. For them, late style is a cinema of death.

Consider the most recent works from two of our greatest masters – David Cronenberg and Paul Schrader. The Shrouds and Oh, Canada are meditations on mortality, made for the dead and dying and, most importantly, those left behind, waiting for their own end…

THE SHROUDS, David Cronenberg 

Evasion is a common response to grief. It's easier to concentrate on other unrelated things than to face the gaping hole that loss left in you, bottomless and fathomless, a void at the very center of the self. Some work tirelessly, holding on to a sense of duty and responsibility, a hollow normalcy that draws away from the fundamental horror of surviving those without whom you can't imagine life. I know I do that. If it's not work then it's cinema, that perfect machine that can turn even the harshest heartbreak into an escape. Anything will do, as long as the mind can't wander. As long as we've shackled ourselves far away from the black hole of loss, resisting its tow. 

It's no use, of course, for its gravity will win out. Such is the natural order of things. Perhaps that's why some decide to say "fuck you" to the natural order and dedicate what time they have left to new mediations between humanity and the cosmic rules that define these limited existences. Advance technology enough, and you might defeat what can't be defeated. At the very least, you can say you tried. If not to others, then to yourself, late at night when sleep won't come, and when it does, nightmares come along with it. Sometimes, it's not even a bad dream, just a memory. In the face of loss, remembering yesterday's joy is today's torture.

All these notions and many more live within David Cronenberg's most personal film in years. Not that you'd know it at a first glance. Everything about its look and feel, the textures of moving images, the rhythms of inhuman speech, point toward a cinematic expression where depersonalization is the tenet supreme. Douglas Koch's lensing is glossy to the point of making faces into plasticine product, while the editing is awkward, the sets a cornucopia of wrongness so acute it can't be dismissed as accidental. For her umpteenth film with Cronenberg, Carol Spier designed a vision of grief twisted by Silicon Valley fallacies, graves in the shape of arcane supersized smartphones with screens on which you can see your loved ones decompose into nothing. 

Those devices are tombstones, connected to a hyper-tech shroud that monitors whatever body it's encasing in the eternal embrace. That's how Kash, a wealthy businessman, is choosing to grieve the loss of his wife, so consumed by the endeavor he leaves little time to process what's motivating it all. Even his AI assistant is a relic of mourning turned into a sick joke, a cartoon of dear departed Becca that speaks with a digitized version of her voice. In the new millennium, artificial intelligence is the new necromancy. Obviously, Karsh is a fictionalized facsimile of David Cronenberg whose Shrouds is a direct response to the death of his wife of nearly four decades, Carolyn. 

Grave Tech could just as well be a movie-producing company for all the parallels between the off-screen world and the hyperreality shining bright at 24 frames per second. It comes to an extreme where every dialogue confronting Kash's mindset feels like a confession from the director, turning The Shrouds into a disjointed piece of expiation that's just as prone to bouts of self-dissection. The essential point seems to be about how one's fascination with flesh is a fruitless pursuit of power over what cannot be controlled. Moreover, possession is illusory, a lie told to oneself as a form of inward-bound soothsaying.

If you own the body, the shroud, the grave, the image of rot, you may grasp what's beyond the threshold of death or invent it if there's naught to be grasped. Well, that's a lie and Cronenberg knows it as well as he knows body horror. The subgenre has long been a solipsistic variation of nightmare cinema, inviting the viewer to identify with the mortified organism on-screen, picture those self-same changes happening to their body. After all, one's body is the world, the ultimate creator of meaning, so to corrupt it is to bring upon a personal apocalypse. But The Shrouds represents an inversion, so tightly focused on what's happening to the body of another, a loved one, that it enters a process of self-effacement.

The narrative erosion is further complicated by the picture's wildest turn, a deep dive into conspiracy theories that, along with a streak of absurdist humor, come out of nowhere to consume the story whole. No matter how personal The Shrouds might be, many will feel cheated out of an emotional experience. Cronenberg is working at his most detached, so presentational in staging that you could confuse the cast for aliens playacting what an outsider supposes humanity might be. However, if you're willing to engage, you may find a film full of ideas, so enmeshed in the debilitating force of grief that it goes down the road of paranoia.

Beset by madness, the narrative circles the painful center of its being without touching it proper. It cannot touch it, or else it would cease to function, to exist. And so, The Shrouds becomes a film about people talking in rooms, spewing nonsense, and going around in circles with no end in sight. We're used to seeing cinema as a means of escape from ourselves, our pain, yet here Cronenberg is, proposing a new possibility - a movie escaping from itself.

OH, CANADA, Paul Schrader

Canada isn't Canada in Paul Schrader's adaptation of Russell Banks' Foregone. It's no country and no geographic place, no territory limited by legal borders devised by those in power and the motions of history. In Oh, Canada, the titular non-place is an idea, fertile with possibility and promise, be they fulfillable or hollow to the core. Canada is the American imagination's desperate solution for its need of moral superiority, a destiny to run toward in search of a freedom much greater than the one the Star-Spangled Banner concedes. Canada is the mythological North and the great nowhere. It's beautiful and hideous, absolute liberation and a self-created prison for those who venture into its lands. 

Canada is where a young Leonard Fife chose to go at a point of no return, in the twilight of the Summer of Love, when a man's life was at a crossroads – literal, literary, metaphorical, and whatnot. Half a century later, at the end of all, that choice still revolves around in the back of the mind, rubbing uncomfortably against the skull of the dying and demented. We meet the older Fife as an esteemed documentarian who, in his advanced age, becomes the subject of another filmmaker's inquisitive camera. They're former students of his, eager to procure the truth hiding within the master's secrets, those he hides even from his wife.

From this premise, one could surmise that Oh, Canada would unravel according to convention and conventional wisdom. The interviewee's monologue would serve as the framing device, as a life's long list of regrets erupts on-screen in illustrative flashback. Some of that happens at a surface level. Dig deeper, and you'll find that what's going on is much trickier. The film makes no qualms about hiding its non-truths, undercutting the older Fife's recollection as the tall tales they are. What to make of someone who, at death's door, can't bring himself to divest the craft of a natural-born fabulist? Then again, that may be the only way to confront the reaper with a straight spine, eyes defiant, an emptied-out heart with nothing left to lose.

The slipperiness of Fife as a character and a recounter makes Oh, Canada a hard film to discuss. It also makes it a thought-provoking piece of late style, brought together by a filmmaker who has been open about his health struggles and might see much of himself in the declining protagonist whose grave is half-dug and ready to receive him. In a fictitious struggle of one man grappling with the eulogy of his life, Schrader conceives a film eager to dismantle the eulogizing impetus, deconstruct the sentiment, and re-imagine the end as a new beginning. Indeed, though Oh, Canada is his most mournful film of late, it feels less like a closing chapter to Schrader's work than Master Gardener and its brethren did.

Through the intersection of self-made myth, the legends created by others, and the truth – whatever that may be – Schrader finds in Fife a figure of endless fascination. That would explain the gentle touch that pervades the picture, featherlight and silk-soft, always generous when prodding at the man's insanities and the suffering he wrought on those he claimed to love. The film is a wild roiling miasma of regret and self-reflection, all contained by classicist form, flirting with retro-stylings and the transcendence of an Ozu-like dialogue. At the center of its truth-telling lies, Richard Gere is as good as he's ever been, a cadaverous memory of his American Gigolo and a mirror raised to his director's face, maybe even his audience. Maybe we're all like Fife, yearning to run to our the Canada of our imagination, away from life, death, ourselves.

The Shrouds has been picked up by Janus Films and Sideshow, with a planned theatrical release for Spring 2025. Oh, Canada is with Kino Lorber, and will be released on December 6th.