Toronto Film Festival 2024 Reviews: “The Shrouds” & “Bird”

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THE SHROUDS (no distrib):  At age 81, David Cronenberg’s fascination with the malignant possibilities of the human body, and with the fiendish manipulation of same, still knows no bounds.  The Shrouds begins with the premise of a cemetery in which the bodies of the decomposing dead are wrapped in electronic swaddling that enables mourners to watch via tombstone video as their loved ones gradually rot.  The high-tech graveyard is the brainchild of Karsh (Vincent Cassell), who’s hoping to launch a business inspired by his own hunger (driven by fascination, grief and sexual desire) to watch the corpse of his recently-dead wife Becca (Diane Kruger) as it deteriorates.  (Cronenberg has said that The Shrouds was inspired by the death of his own wife in 2017, and Cassell is groomed to resemble the film’s director.)  This being a Cronenberg story, that’s only the beginning of the madness, as Karsh discovers what appear to be post-mortem growths on his wife’s cadaver, and tries to investigate whether they’re some kind of mutation, or sinisterly implanted by other parties, perhaps the ones who recently trashed the cemetery.  The film could be said to feature tumors of its own, as the potential suspects and conspiracy theories multiply, and Karsh becomes enmeshed with his wife’s identical twin sister (also played by Kruger), her hacker ex-husband (Guy Pearce), and the wife of a dying billionaire (Sandrine Holt).  The Shrouds has a distinctly enervated, dirge-like tone, and as it follows the pattern of some of Cronenberg’s classics by spinning its plot into increasingly baroque, dream-logic twists, it abandons most of its concerns with emotion and characterization.  The script burrows so deeply into the soft tissue of its filmmaker’s brain that viewers attempting to make sense of what he’s placing on his tombstone screen may turn away not so much out of disgust as because the transmissions grey out.  The actors give their all for Cronenberg, especially Kruger, who allows the director to use her body in a variety of bizarre ways, and the film is darkly handsome as shot by Douglas Koch.  Cronenberg’s wavelength, however, may be one that only he can fully receive.

BIRD (MUBI):  Andrea Arnold rose to the status of critics’ darling largely on the basis of her 2009 film Fish Tank, about the travails of an English teen girl growing up in difficult family and societal circumstances.  With that as her calling card, she spent the next 15 years with a remake of Wuthering Heights, the American youth indie epic American Honey, the documentary Cow, and some dabbling in prestige TV (including the troubled 2nd season of Big Little Lies).  With Bird, she returns to her filmmaking roots.  Our protagonist this time is 12-year old Bailey (Nykiya Adams), who lives resentfully with her neglectful father Bug (Barry Keoghan), her half-brother, and Bug’s girlfriend, whom Bailey discovers Bug is about to marry.  This makes Bailey even more furious than she usually is, but there isn’t much she can do, since her mother is in worse shape than Bug, shacked up with an abusive drug dealer.  Bailey wanders the streets and landscapes of the town, filming cell phone videos mostly of the local varieties of winged creatures.  On one of her journeys, she happens upon Bird (Franz Rogowski), an eccentric who wears a skirt and speaks only somewhat comprehensibly.  Nevertheless, Bird is the only one who understands and cares about Bailey’s sensitivity, and while she helps him try to find the family he had nearby, he reveals himself to be a magical realism figure who can rescue her as well.  Bird has vitality, and Adams is a real find.  Too often, though, Arnold leans on the aesthetics of social media videos and a constant thrum of music to prop up a plot that’s familiar from many other growing-up tales (including her own prior work), and the decision to introduce a fantastical element feels, in its own way, unoriginal as well.  For all its scenes of characters speeding on bikes, in cars and in the air, Bird never gains altitude.