David Cronenberg has been creating movies that make people uncomfortable for a long time, and his new movie, The Shrouds, is one that may not have been given the reception he was looking at during its Cannes Film Festival debut. While appearing at an event following the U.S. premiere of the movie, Cronenberg explained that he believes Cannes audiences “didn’t get” the movie, because they were “afraid to laugh in the face of grief.”
The Shrouds is a darkly humorous story about a wealthy businessman who creates a new piece of technology called GraveTech. This comes in the form of a shroud that allows those grieving to watch the decomposition of their loved one’s corpse via video links. While that in itself is a lot to take in, the story focuses on GraveTech’s creator who discovers the grave of his wife has been desecrated, along with that of several others, and he sets out to find the culprit.
For Cronenberg, there is nothing wrong with laughing in the face of death, and he feels that the Cannes audience was perhaps not able to bring themselves to do that – something he went on to point out he did not believe would be an issue at the New York Film Festival where his Q&A session took place. He explained:
“They didn’t get the movie, partly because of the language and cultural things and the fact that maybe people felt if they laughed it was being disrespectful or something. It’s the pressure of the Cannes Film Festival. We didn’t get the kind of laughs that I knew we would get, let’s say, at the Toronto Film Festival or that we would get here. I wasn’t here while the movie was playing, but I hope you laughed a little bit. Life without humor is not something I could bear.”
David Cronenberg Doesn’t Believe Dark Movies Need to Avoid Laughter
While it is hard to contradict the fact that David Cronenberg was responsible for a number of deeply disturbing movies of the 1980s, there has always been a pitch-black vein of humor running through his projects. That makes it understandable that The Shrouds also incorporates a little lightness into its dark subject matter. For the director, that also has a part to play in the making of the movie. He explained:
“To me, movies are children playing in a sandbox, you can get so serious about it because of the money, because of the time pressure. I heard that an Ingmar Bergman set was actually hilarious and a lot of laughs. … That makes sense to me because the seriousness goes into the filmmaking.”
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When it comes to The Shrouds, it seems that Cronenberg managed to get the reaction he hoped for from the U.S. premiere audience, as the event moderator, festival artistic director Dennis Lim, noted that laughter had “come freely and often” during the screening. While the movie currently holds a 71% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes, it is worth pointing out that since the review that came out of Cannes, the film has received only positive ones from its screenings at the Toronto Film Festival in September, and now the New York Film Festival. Audiences will have a chance to make their views heard when The Shrouds is released early in 2025.