The Shrouds (David Cronenberg, 2024)

David Cronenberg's new film The Shrouds is a highly personal and strangely moving meditation on grief, love, and the double-edged sword that is technology.  Inspired by the 2017 death of the director's wife, Carolyn, the film follows Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a bereaved Toronto-based widower who invents an intricate camera system that allows people to observe their loved ones in the grave.  This unnerving innovation becomes both the centre of Karsh's funeral business and a marker of his monomaniacal desire to cling to the past, with his devotion to the dead recalling that of Julien in François Truffaut's The Green Room.

While Truffaut cast himself as the lead in that Henry James adaptation, Cronenberg, who has stepped in front of the camera on a number of occasions, stops short of such a move in The Shrouds—although he does goes as far as to furnish Cassel with a coiffure that bears an uncanny resemblance to the director's distinctive shock of white hair.  Cassel, collaborating with Cronenberg for the third time following the pair's work on A History of Violence and A Dangerous Method, makes a fine job of balancing cool detachment with simmering obsession, as Karsh is sucked into a world even darker than the one he signed up for.

Diane Kruger, who replaced Léa Seydoux just a month before filming commenced, is equally impressive in her triple role as Karsh's wife, sister in-law, and AI assistant, and Guy Pearce is very good value as a jittery IT whiz.  But when the film changes gear and moves into areas such as industrial espionage and corporate conspiracy, these admittedly fun elements prove slightly distracting.  Visually, The Shrouds is stunning, with cinematography (from Douglas Koch, returning from Cronenberg's previous feature Crimes of the Future) that frames characters in a way that underlines the crippling isolation that accompanies mourning.

David Cronenberg's calling card, body horror—an important, if sometimes overstated, aspect of his work—is present here, although it never overshadows the film's emotional core.  Given that the past year has seen The Substance comprehensively out-Cronenberg the Canadian auteur (at least superficially), it's refreshing to witness how latter-day Cronenberg only employs body horror to serve the narrative.  The Shrouds, which was originally envisaged as a Netflix series, is a richly compelling work, one that prompts viewers to carefully consider both the normative emotions of grief and technology's relationship with human values.

Darren Arnold

Images: Pyramide Films

BFI Flare: I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun, 2024)

Hands-down the finest film of 2024, Jane Schoenbrun's jaw-dropping sophomore feature I Saw the TV Glow is included in BFI Flare's Best of Year strand, where it plays tomorrow alongside Queer, Will & Harper and Power Alley.  Schoenbrun's debut feature, the lo-fi experimental horror We're All Going to the World's Fair, was an unsettling and narratively challenging effort that centred on a sinister online game; while that ambitious, creepypasta-like film heralded the arrival of an exciting new talent, it only hinted at what the filmmaker would achieve with their next feature.  In many ways, We're All Going to the World's Fair feels more like a precursor to Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink than it does to I Saw the TV Glow, despite some obvious thematic connections between Schoenbrun's films—which form part of a trilogy that will be capped by the director's debut novel Public Access Afterworld.   

I Saw the TV Glow wears its influences on its sleeve, and the core of the film's DNA can be traced to Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko, the work of David Lynch in general and Twin Peaks in particular, and The Smashing Pumpkins' track "Tonight, Tonight" (and its Méliès-inspired video).  Schoenbrun's film begins, almost in medias res, in the analogue mid-90s, when teenagers Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) and Owen (Justice Smith) bond over young adult TV show The Pink Opaque, which centres on two girls who share a psychic connection they use to fight evil; Owen isn't allowed to stay up to watch the programme when it airs, so Maddy supplies him with grainy VHS tapes of the episodes.  When Maddy suddenly goes missing, presumed dead, the series is cancelled; but she resurfaces eight years later, prompting a confounded Owen to rewatch the frankly terrifying finale of The Pink Opaque.

Looking to explain her disappearance, Maddy takes Owen to a bar called the Double Lunch, a venue that appears in both reality and The Pink Opaque, and as such seems to serve as a nexus between worlds; in an overt reference to Twin Peaks: The Return's Roadhouse and its musical guests, we watch Sloppy Jane perform the mesmerising "Claw Machine" on stage before Maddy embarks on her story.  The detached, dissociative Owen, who once reneged on plans to run away with Maddy, again loses his nerve as she outlines what he needs to do in order to emerge from his torpor, and Maddy subsequently vanishes for good.  Years and decades pass as Owen works at a cinema, then an indoor amusement park, while Maddy and the series seem all but absent from his thoughts—until one rainy, restless night, when he decides to stream The Pink Opaque, which is now quite different from how he remembers it.

In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer-like The Pink Opaque, one of the protagonists, Tara, is played by singer-songwriter Lindsey Jordan, whose band Snail Mail contribute a cover of "Tonight, Tonight" to the film's soundtrack; moreover, Amber Benson, who played Tara Maclay in Buffy, appears here as the mother of one of Owen's schoolmates.  Yet this meta-trivia never proves distracting; somehow, the haunting I Saw the TV Glow manages to be both immersive and self-reflexive, and its beguiling crepuscular world(s) may make the viewer as obsessed with the film as Maddy and Owen are with the unnerving YA show.  This eerie, near-unclassifiable work is no mere pastiche; it's a heartbreaking, highly singular piece of mise en abyme cinema, one that gets under your skin and stays there for days.

Darren Arnold

Images: A24

BFI Flare: Black Fruit (Elisha Smith-Leverock, 2024)

Black Fruit (German: Schwarze Früchte), which screens tomorrow at BFI Flare, is an eight-part series from Germany's ARD1 that centres on two black twentysomethings in Hamburg.  The series dips into themes of friendship, identity and loss as it follows Lalo (played by series creator Lamin Leroy Gibba), an ex-architecture student floundering after the death of his father.  When his relationship with the conceited Tobias (Nick Romeo Reimann) ends, Lalo finds comfort in his best friend Karla (Melodie Simina), who is enjoying a successful and steady career in finance but nonetheless struggles with discrimination in her workplace.

The series gets off to a strong start, but its back half is horribly uneven; the low point comes in the form of the fifth episode, which is when directing duties transfer from Elisha Smith-Leverock to David Uzochukwu.  This part is more or less a chamber piece, one in which the players aren't given much of interest to work with.  With better writing, this stark change of pace might have worked, but instead it highlights how the show thrives when it's out on the streets of Hamburg, capturing the sights and sounds of the city's vibrant nightlife; without such momentum, this turgid episode places the dialogue under a scrutiny it can't bear.

Following this episode, Black Fruit gets moving again, but it never fully recovers from this misstep.  The remaining parts feel very lopsided, focusing on Lalo as Karla is all but sidelined until the series finale, when an engrossing storyline centring on her professional difficulties is hastily wrapped up.  Given that Lamin Leroy Gibba is also the show's head writer, perhaps this shouldn't be too surprising, but it's jarring to find that Karla's story arc is neglected for so long; while flashbacks to Lalo's childhood are both engaging and well-wrought, the adult version of the self-centred protagonist could use a bit less screen time.

The cinematography, courtesy of Claudia Schröder and Malcolm Saidou—as with the directors, they get four episodes apiece—is perhaps the strongest element here, with a range of bright and muted tones reflecting the characters' various moods.  Despite its flaws, Black Fruit retains a messy charm, and its exploration of German society, in which it addresses, inter alia, racism, sexism and homophobia, makes for refreshing viewing.  There's the sense that the team involved—a writers' room was set up to develop the script—will have learned a great deal from the experience; with this in mind, a second season would be no bad thing.

Darren Arnold

Images: BFI