MOVIE NEWS – David Cronenberg says Cannes audiences were ‘afraid’ to laugh at his morbid new film…
David Cronenberg has a long history of making movies that make people uncomfortable. His new film, The Shrouds, is also one that may not have received the reception he was hoping for when it debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. At the event following the film’s American premiere, Cronenberg explained that he thought the Cannes audience “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 (Vincent Cassel) who creates a new technology called GraveTech. It comes in the form of a shroud that allows mourners to watch their loved one’s body decompose via video link. While that’s gross in itself, the story centres on the creator of GraveTech, who discovers that his wife’s grave has been desecrated, along with several others, and sets out to find the culprit.
For Cronenberg, it’s okay to laugh at death.
He feels that the Cannes audience may not have been able to bring himself to do that – something he then noted that he didn’t think would be a problem at the New York Film Festival, where the Q&A 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 does not believe that dark films should avoid laughter
While it’s hard to argue with the fact that David Cronenberg was responsible for many deeply disturbing films in the eighties, his projects have always had a touch of pitch-black humour. So, it is understandable that he adds a little lightness to the dark theme of The Shrouds. For the director, this also plays a role in the making of the film. 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.”
As for The Shrouds, it seems Cronenberg managed to elicit the desired reaction from the American premiere audience, as event moderator Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, noted that they laughed “freely and often” during the screening. Although the film currently has a 71% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes, it is worth noting that since the criticism received from Cannes, the film has only received positive feedback from the screenings held at the Toronto Film Festival in September and now at the New York Film Festival got Audiences will have their say when The Shrouds hits theatres in early 2025.
Source: Deadline
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