Cinema May Be Dying but the Old Auteurs Still Have Plenty to Say

The Shrouds begins with a bad first date. In David Cronenberg’s new film, widower Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel) invites Myrna (Jennifer Dale) to a restaurant that doubles as a showroom for his graveyard business. Throughout their somewhat stilted dialogue, the decor of this dining room—black, statuesque robes encased in glass—is never absent from the frame. These, Karsh explains, are the burial shrouds innovated by his company GraveTech, equipped with livestreaming cameras pointed inward, allowing mourners to view, in real time, the decay of the corpse. Karsh invites Myrna to see his wife’s grave, just outside, where they can view the progress of her skeleton to dust on the GraveTech app together. If there’s a second date, we don’t see it.

Attuning ourselves to the vibrations of the elderly, the dying, and the dead might be a valuable skill for fans of artistic cinema in 2025, when the medium itself seems on death’s door. Its infirmity has a number of culprits: superhero box office dominance, short-form videos eroding attention spans, streaming services hollowing out theatrical exhibition. The artists who most visibly defined this medium, predominantly white and male, are either dead or not far from it: David Lynch, Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Schrader, Cronenberg. The New Hollywood generation of the 1970s, once upstarts in the ashes of the old Hollywood studio system, have themselves become the old guard and are approaching the end of the road, along with the movie business as they (and we) have known it for most of our lives.

The notion of Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) quadrupling its budget at the box office seems a distant memory indeed, never mind an oddity like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Coppola, 1992) earning more than $200 million (US), or even a stylish adult drama like American Gigolo (Schrader, 1980) making over $50 million (US), according to the box office website The Numbers. These films were, to grossly simplify, predominantly concerned with the moral compromises demanded of men by a world increasingly given over to profit extraction.

Today, the belts have tightened further, the hour has grown late, and some of these directors’ own moral transgressions are coming to light. And yet, entering or exiting their seventh or eighth decades on earth, they’re making some of the most revelatory work of their careers: films that interrogate if and how we, as their younger audience, can look at an aging body and find space for all the baggage of a life.

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D epending on your persuasion, Martin Scorsese has spent his fifty-odd-year career either critiquing or glorifying masculinity with tales of violence, hubris, and organized crime, including Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), and Casino (1995). In 2019, at seventy-seven years old, he made his Netflix debut with The Irishman. The film leaned into its anachronistic place in the streaming market, sporting a ’70s-esque logline as a three-and-a-half-hour organized-crime epic.

Scorsese opted to use de-aging technology on the director’s favoured elderly leads instead of casting younger talent. It tells the story of teamster Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) who, with hard and diligent work toward evil ends, becomes the personal bodyguard/hitman to the Bufalino crime family and union boss Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). Heralding the end of Scorsese’s long career of box office smashes with a Netflix release, The Irishman’s stakes are summarized by a war story Frank tells early in the film. “I never understood how they would just keep digging their own graves,” Frank wonders, recalling an assignment to dispose of two prisoners of war. “Maybe they thought if they did a good job, the guy with the gun would change his mind.”

Frank tells his story while in a nursing home, with flashback sequences hampered by the elderly cast’s distinctly geriatric motions appearing out of place in their digitally rendered younger faces. There’s no way around it: it’s a film about old men by an old man. Upon release, The Irishman was criticized for the lack of dialogue allocated to its nominal female lead, Anna Paquin, in the role of Frank’s daughter Peggy. Her character is mostly silent as she refuses her father the comfort of words, before she refuses to even look at him by the film’s end. In this light, The Irishman becomes the final statement on the male-driven tale of violence from the man who’s made more of them than anyone else.

Commercially, The Irishman did well. Ted Sarandos, then chief content officer of Netflix, announced a week after the release that the film had been watched to at least 70 percent completion by 26.4 million accounts. But Netflix content, as Will Tavlin recently revealed in an essay for n+1, is imagined with a second screen in mind. “Have this character announce what they’re doing,” Tavlin transcribes a typical script note from the higher-ups, “so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”

The Irishman ends with Frank, now wheelchair-bound, imploring a departing priest not to close his door, not all the way. Peggy is gone, long since estranged, and the camera rests just outside the door, looking through the crack. The priest leaves, and Frank’s words hang in the silence for us alone. But viewers may have left 30 percent ago, and those remaining might be looking at their phones, or folding laundry, waiting for someone to announce, “Frank died alone.”

B efore being accused of sexual assault by his former assistant in April, Paul Schrader returned, briefly, to theatres with last year’s Oh, Canada. In it, the director of many important and challenging films over the past half century, among them Hardcore (1979) and First Reformed (2018), and a screenplay writer of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), continues a career-long fascination with guilt and redemption.

Oh, Canada takes for its subject Leonard Fife, a fictional director of non-fiction films, draft dodger, teacher, and hero to a generation of activist filmmakers. We meet Fife on the last day of his life, portrayed by Richard Gere made up to look well beyond his seventy-five years: eyes puffy, skin bruised, lips chapped.

At his well-appointed Montreal house, Fife has gathered a small documentary crew composed of his former students, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill), who have gone on to successful careers in the industry, and his significantly younger wife, Emma (Uma Thurman), also a former student. The story of his life is an unbroken string of lies, betrayals, and abuses of power, including over those now listening to his tale. In light of recent revelations about Schrader, himself a once-beloved elder statesman who is now accused of abusing his power over his mentees, the film takes on a troubling new patina.

Oh, Canada seems to take responsibility in a way that its director evidently never did. The real-life suit had been settled out of court, allegedly, until Schrader recently reneged on his end of the deal. But the film is equally focused on the responses of his younger interlocutors as on Fife’s testimony. Emma, his wife, attempts to preserve the version of Fife the world knows, a moral stalwart who bucked a corrupt industry to tell bold truths his way. Malcolm and Diana, on the other hand, seize the opportunity to wring their subject for every drop of controversy he’s worth.

Oh, Canada is terrifyingly honest by one measure and unfathomably cowardly by another. Fife’s confession appears less sincere in the wake of Schrader’s alleged abuses, with the character coming clean in a way the artist never could. Long in the tooth as they may be, these men are still capable of aggravating old wounds and inflicting new ones. Who could be blamed for wanting to look away?

Many of these final works have been affixed with the label “late style.” The term was first used by Theodor Adorno with reference to the latter works of Beethoven, but it was codified by Edward Said in his 2004 London Review of Books essay “Thoughts on Late Style.” Rather than prizing works that neatly tie the bow on the loose threads of a body of work, Said professed an interest in works that forefront all that is ongoing, unresolved, and messy about ending a life. Of the final plays of Henrik Ibsen, he asked: “What of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction?”

As cinema exits the theatre and enters the retirement home, “late style” has gained new traction amongst younger viewers, primarily on Letterboxd, the cinephiles’ social media site, but also in legacy publications: Sight and Sound, published by the British Film Institute, titled one of their 2024 roundups “The Year in Late Style.” This critical lens asks viewers not to turn away from films by old men, with their stilted dialogue, clumsy de-aging, and uncomfortable themes of mortality and failure, and instead recalibrate one’s critical compass to their peculiar sensations.

And yet, prizing intransigence, difficulty, and contradiction as values in and of themselves risks creating another framework to contain the sensibilities of the elderly. On the one hand, “late style” may have led some viewers to engage with a work like Oh, Canada, with all its strange, late textures. On the other, Schrader’s embodiment of the prized “difficulty” and “intransigence” of late style may have distracted from the warning signs of his devious behaviour on Facebook, where the director speculated broadly about gender identity and proposed casting Kevin Spacey in a future film. Like any approach to coping with the elderly, late style has its limitations.

D avid Cronenberg’s The Shrouds casts doubt on the youthful arrogance that would presume that the living are the only ones with any agency in our relationships with those at the end of the road, or even with those past it. Cronenberg has long been probing the limits of human subjectivity in his films. In works like Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), and A History of Violence (2005), he questioned its boundaries, wondering where it comes from, what it can extend to, and how it can change. In The Shrouds, made in the wake of his wife Carolyn’s untimely death, he pushes this examination to a new frontier, wondering if it might indeed extend past death.

Karsh, portrayed as a clear Cronenberg stand-in, has been a widower for four years after his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), died of cancer. Karsh’s widowhood has entered him into premature dotage; he describes his sexless middle years: rarely going on dates, spending too much time watching Becca’s corpse decompose on his phone. Cronenberg’s film forefronts a cross-contamination between mourning, surveillance, and pornography—three facets of modern life that define a subject on one side of a divide and an object on the other. Mourning is a new ingredient in a common Cronenbergian brew. The film opens on a dream-like image of Karsh looking through a window into Becca’s grave, panting either in mounting arousal or emotional distress. “I couldn’t stand it that she was alone in there,” he later tells his date about his dead wife, sounding at once horny, lonely, and suspicious.

The plot of The Shrouds kicks off in true when Karsh’s graveyard/showroom for his GraveTech corporation is vandalized and he loses connectivity with his wife’s bones. Investigating this crime, Karsh discovers a web of conspiracies stretching over continents and beyond the grave, revealing devastating secrets about his business and his marriage.

Cronenberg casts light on the unpredictability at the heart of our relationships with the elderly, the dying, and the dead. When technology enters the equation, these relationships grow more complex. In The Shrouds, Kruger plays Karsh’s dead wife, Becca; her living twin sister, Terry; and his AI assistant, Hunny. He’s surrounded by Becca, long after she’s gone. He’s haunted, aroused, tormented throughout the film, a pawn in the hands of his omnipotent dead wife. A touching, troubling frame shows Karsh, naked, stepping into a burial shroud like Becca’s, attempting to see what she sees, feel what she feels. GraveTech’s extension of the surveillance state into the afterlife is the bridge too far, the final connection that makes us recognize the viability of the dead subject, for good or for ill. Do the dead see? Karsh seems to question under the shroud. Do they feel?

Whether we ignore the dying, exploit them, shush them, or stay rapt at their every word, every pose is a reduction, placing a subject on one side of a divide and an object on the other. As The Shrouds informs us, they continue to love, arouse, control, and hurt right up until they go and long after. Just as the living die, the dead live.

If late style is neither the “off to bed now, old man” proffered by characters in Oh, Canada nor the refusal to engage altogether embodied by Peggy in The Irishman, it nevertheless provides another rigid frame by which to subdue the elderly. With The Shrouds, Cronenberg, as usual, looks beyond.

In a 2018 speech, Cronenberg said that, like the human body, cinema isn’t dying but rather “evolving, changing.” In our eagerness to pronounce it dead, dying, or “late,” we risk deafening ourselves to the music of its death rattles, its still potent threats and promises.