a review of 裹尸布

HOOPTOBER XII NIGHT TWENTY-TWO: Feels more like Cronenberg working through the grief of losing his wife of 38 years than anything else, as pretty much everything outside of the characters played by Vincent Cassel (as Cronenberg's personal avatar) and Diane Kruger (playing variations of his deceased wife) winds up being more or less superfluous by the end. The main premise involves Cassel as a weirdly affectless tech entrepreneur whose billion-dollar startup idea involves selling people a constant live 3D video feed of their departed loved ones moldering away in the grave. This doesn't seem to be responding to anything in present-day tech culture so much as simply being a metaphor for Cronenberg's long career as the poet laureate of body horror. The movie's plot is a pretty languid affair, in which one of Cassel's prototype high-tech cemeteries is vandalized in a mysterious attack that ends up dredging up a whole convoluted maybe-conspiracy involving Icelandic environmentalists, Chinese spies, medical malpractice, artificial intelligence, and a schizophrenic computer hacker played by a seemingly shell-shocked Guy Pearce. None of this really ends up mattering to the final movie more than the extremely intimate and disturbing scenes in which Cassel relives his memories of his wife's physical and psychological battle with cancer, with the various scars and amputations inflicted on Kruger's nude body, graphically depicted through some very convincing makeup/CGI. This is where we finally see the Cronenberg we all know, mixing the strangely erotic with the existentially horrific, but in a way that is clearly more personal than he has ever dared previously. It's too bad that the rest of the film feels like more of a rote exercise, but it's worth a watch for those of us who have closely followed his previous films.