The Morrigan review – spirit of pagan demon queen unleashed in Irish burial chamber horror

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Archaeologists blunder into an ancient and unwittingly release a vengeful monster – with predictable and conventional results In Irish folklore, the Morrígan is a powerful goddess of death and war. This horror movie imagines her as an actual historical figure: a pagan queen massacred with her followers by Christians. A quick scene at the start of the film shows the dirty deed. The Morrígan’s rage against misogyny has screamed down through the centuries – so it’s a shame the film frames her not as a feminist icon but a highly conventional horror movie nemesis; a malign vengeful female to be crushed and destroyed. There is nothing to punch the air about in the end. Saffron Burrows plays an archaeologist called Fiona who has been repeatedly passed over for tenure at her US university. When Fiona presents her radical theory that the myth of the Morrígan may have a basis in real life, her slippery colleague Jonathan (Jonathan Forbes) is made the lead on the dig. Fiona is forced to bring al...
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The Shrouds review – David Cronenberg gets wrapped up in grief

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Cannes film festival
Elaborate necrophiliac meditation on loss and longing stars Vincent Cassel as an oncologist who has founded a restaurant with a hi-tech cemetery attached

David Cronenberg’s new film is a contorted sphinx without a secret, an eroticised necrophiliac meditation on grief, longing and loss that returns this director to his now very familiar Ballardian fetishes. It’s intriguing and exhausting: a quasi-murder mystery and doppelganger sex drama combined with a sci-fi conspiracy thriller which comes very close to participating in that very xenophobia it purports to satirise. And among its exasperating plot convolutions, there is a centrally important oncologist who was having a possible affair with the hero’s dead wife and who had also been her first sexual partner as a teenager – but who never appears on camera.

Yet for all this, the film has its own creepy, enveloping mausoleum atmosphere of disquiet, helped by the jarring electronic score by Howard Shore. We are in Toronto of the present or near future in which a wealthy and stylish widower and entrepreneur called Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has founded a restaurant with a cemetery attached: a state of the art burial place where people can bury their loved ones with a new “shroud” whose thousands of tiny cameras can record and transmit real time, 8K pictures of the body’s decay, which you can watch on your smartphone.

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