Film Reviews: The Shrouds | F1: The Movie | Hot Milk

F1 the Movie (12A) ★★★☆☆

Hot Milk (15) ★★☆☆☆

Even with a new generation of acolytes nipping at his heels, David Cronenberg still seems intent on breaking fresh ground when it comes to exploring the twisted relationship between the corporate and the corporeal. In the case of The Shrouds, though, “fresh” is a relative term given the way necrotic flesh is baked into its very premise. Revolving around a new technology that enables the bereaved to grieve their deceased loved ones by live-streaming their rotting remains, the film opens with a character asking the question, “How dark do you want to go?” and proceeds to answer it with an unsettling exploration of love, sex, death and grief in a culture where technology is consistently used to disrupt the natural order of things.

Even with a new generation of acolytes nipping at his heels, David Cronenberg still seems intent on breaking fresh ground when it comes to exploring the twisted relationship between the corporate and the corporeal. In the case of The Shrouds, though, “fresh” is a relative term given the way necrotic flesh is baked into its very premise. Revolving around a new technology that enables the bereaved to grieve their deceased loved ones by live-streaming their rotting remains, the film opens with a character asking the question, “How dark do you want to go?” and proceeds to answer it with an unsettling exploration of love, sex, death and grief in a culture where technology is consistently used to disrupt the natural order of things.

Vincent Cassel takes the lead as Cronenberg proxy Karsh, a director of industrial videos turned tech entrepreneur who has developed the aforementioned system in the wake of his beloved wife’s painful death from breast cancer. The latter, played by Diane Kruger, appears in flashbacks that Cronenberg presents as eroticised dream sequences showing her disease-ravaged body slowly failing her. These sexualised memories are a source of comfort for Karsh, as are the high resolution thermal imaging scans of her interred body decomposing in the special video-and-software-equipped graveyard he’s in the process of franchising.

When Karsh spots some unusual nodes on his dead wife’s skeleton, however, he becomes suspicious about the surgeon who operated on her – a suspicion fuelled by his paranoid sister-in-law, also played by Kruger, as well as by the subsequent targeted vandalism of his facility, including the hacking of his clients’ (and his own) encrypted data.

Here Cronenberg weaves in corporate conspiracy elements, a mischievous AI avatar (Kruger again), a twitchy tech nerd (Guy Pearce) and a lot of mordant humour to create the impression that The Shrouds is some kind of quasi biotech thriller. That the film doesn’t satisfy as such, though, is perhaps the point. Ruminate on it for a while and these elements seem like intentional red herrings, a way of symbolising how culture avoids confronting the physical toll dying takes on the body — something the The Shrouds, in it’s own gnarly and heightened way, certainly can’t be accused of doing.

In much the same way that the 1990 Tom Cruise NASCAR movie Days of Thunder was conceived and marketed as Top Gun on wheels, F1 the Movie is really Top Gun Maverick on wheels, just with Brad Pitt instead of Cruise in the driving seat. Sharing the same director (Joseph Kosinski), producer (Jerry Bruckheimer) and storyline, the film uses its Formula 1 backdrop to deliver a precision-engineered sports movie that hits every expected beat.

Thus we have Pitt as Sonny Hayes, a one-time contemporary of Ayrton Senna who flamed out before fulfilling his potential and is now living an itinerant life as a remarkably well-preserved 60-something high-speed racing driver for hire. Drifting around the country like the motor racing equivalent of Jack Reacher or the Littlest Hobo, he’s happy enough – until Javier Bardem’s former colleague-turned-F1 Team owner Ruben rocks up in need of a gifted driver to help his financially troubled operation get some points on the board to avoid bankruptcy.

Arriving at Silverstone full of cowboy swagger, Sonny immediately finds himself clashing with the team’s fame-chasing, cocksure rookie, Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris), whose nose is out of joint at having an old-timer come in an steal his thunder. Kinetic action scenes and intergenerational conflict duly ensue, the former more entertaining than the latter thanks to Kosinski’s talent for figuring out visceral, immersive shots over his somewhat limited ability to capture the nuances of human drama. That said Kerry Condon makes the most of a thinly written character to provide some spark as the team’s lead engineer and love interest for Pitt. As undeniably thrilling as some of the race scenes are, though, the bloated two-and-a-half-hour runtime takes the film perilously close to replicating the tedium of watching an entire F1 race from start to finish.

Adapted from Debrah Levy’s literary bestseller of the same name, Hot Milk is a fairly soporific drama about a young woman (Emma Mackey) finding herself while accompanying her wheelchair-bound mother (Fiona Shaw) to a Spanish clinic to get treatment for the possibly psychosomatic condition that’s robbed her of the ability to walk for most of her life. Freighted with Freudian tension, the controlling mother-daughter relationship is – despite the best efforts of the cast – dully rendered. Ditto Mackey’s character’s exploration of her sexuality with a local seamstress who has a dark family secret of her own (she’s played by Vicky Krieps). Indeed writer/director Rebecca Lenkiewicz struggles throughout to transpose Levy’s rich text to the screen in visually arresting ways, building to a provocative ending that’s not convincing in the least.

The Shrouds and Hot Milk are in cinemas from Friday 3 July; F1 the Movie is in cinemas now