Boxed In

I’m still waiting for several titles to arrive, so this isn’t going to be as comprehensive a new-release roundup as I’d hoped. (Sorry, Drop and Opus fans – but hang in there!

I do have three films to talk about that are very, very different in pretty much every way – and hopefully one of them sparks joy for you. For me, it’s the David Cronenberg picture ... but then, it always is.

Cronenberg has been floating the possibility that The Shrouds may be his final feature, and while I hope that’s not true I could certainly understand if it was; the man is in his early eighties now, and I don’t think anyone would argue with him if he wanted to retire and enjoy the dystopia for a while. And this film certainly feels like a summing up, in a different way than Crimes of the Future did; that film was about looking back at his body of work and finding things to giggle at, and this is just him sitting quietly with a body.

I wrote about this when the film screened at TIFF last fall, and even discussed it with Cronenberg onstage after one of those shows; The Shrouds is a story about a man who throws himself into his art after the death of his wife, and finds that his work won’t save him. In the movie, the artist is Karsh (Vincent Cassell, styled as a dead ringer for Cronenberg), an entrepreneur who responds to losing his beloved Becca to cancer by designing technological cadaver wraps that allow the living to watch their loved ones decompose in real time.

It’s a ghoulish and horrible idea, and the movie knows it – but it’s also Karsh literally refusing to let Becca go, and Cronenberg, who lost his wife Carolyn in 2017, knows that too. Everyone around him, including Becca’s twin sister Terry (Diane Kruger, who also appears in flashbacks and dreams as Becca) and Terry’s ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce), begs him to move on, but Karsh stays resolute – even as the world starts to close in around him, too.

In conversation with films like Videodrome, Naked Lunch and Crash, and easily Cronenberg’s most personal film since he dealt with his father’s cancer almost forty years ago in The Fly, this is the saddest thing he’s ever made. We got into it during that Q&A, which I am sad to say was not recorded for future inclusion on a special-edition release … which Sphere Media’s Blu-ray/DVD combo set is decidedly not.

Where Sphère’s Blu-ray of Crimes of the Future came with an EPK, The Shrouds is a bare-bones movie-only release. (It's shipped in a DVD-scaled digipak, which is … a choice.) The film does look very good, the 1080p/24 master offering an excellent representation of Cronenberg’s chilly interiors and empty open spaces, while the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio does a fine job suggesting of the airlessness of Karsh’s life, even when he's outdoors. The scenes in his Tesla have a specific tightness to the mix that suggests how suffocating the space is, even though he’s alone. Or, more likely because he’s alone. And he always will be.

You know who else is alone? Chris Lemons, the saturation diver played by Finn Cole in Alex Parkinson’s deep-sea survival drama Last Breath. When an accident stranded Lemons on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean with mere minutes of life support remaining, his fellow divers Duncan Allcock (Woody Harrelson) and Dave Yuasa (Simu Liu) raced to save him, aided by their topside crew.

It’s a true story that plays like a ticking-clock thriller – and it’s also a fascinating exercise in adaptation, since Parkinson already told this story in his 2019 documentary of the same name and has the opportunity to be bigger and more cinematic than his archival footage allowed.

What’s impressive, then, given the feature-film budget and access to genuine movie stars, is the restraint Parkinson shows in his storytelling: This version of Last Breath could have been bombastic and overwrought, but it takes a different path: It’s about professionalism, celebrating people whose competence and fortitude spelled the difference between tragedy and triumph. And Liu and Cole really are acting underwater … though not as far underwater as Yuasa and Lemons were, of course.

Elevation’s Blu-ray presents the film in crisp, clear 1080p/24, with an appropriately immersive DTS-MA 5.1 soundtrack; sure, UHD and Atmos would have been nice but Last Breath is a small movie with small footprint; it’s a miracle it’s being released on disc at all. (In the US, Universal Studios Home Entertainment release.)

The disc has a nice suite of supplements, including a commentary track from director Parkinson and producer and co-writer David Brooks, who also feature heavily in the ten-minute featurette “Into the Deep: Making Last Breath,” which offers some nifty looks at the massive salt-water tank in Malta that hosted the underwater shoot.

Simu was my guest when we screened the film at TIFF's Secret Movie Club earlier this year, and he had some fun stories about acting with Harrelson through a dive helmet – and indeed, in the featurette it seems like everyone’s having a great time while trying to be respectful of the true story in their interviews. They’re much looser in the brief gag reel.

Finally, we have A Working Man, from David Ayer and Jason Statham, who gave us last year’s gonzo Bourne Identity riff The Beekeeper; audiences expecting something similarly bananapants will be disappointed to learn that this project – despite being adapted by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone from a novel by comic-book writer Chuck Dixon – is pretty standard fare.

Statham plays Levon Cade, an ex-commando now working construction in Chicago for a nice man named Joe (Michael Peña), who’s made Levon an unofficial member of his family. And when Joe’s daughter (Arianna Rivas) is abducted by Russian mobsters, Joe must set aside his hopes of living a peaceful life to retrieve her – by killing absolutely anyone who looks at him funny. And guess what? He’s really good at that!

It’s just an excuse to let Statham play another dead-eyed murderman, but the gonzo logic and fevered momentum of The Beekeeper is missing; either Ayer didn’t want to repeat himself or he was totally freaked out that his one deviation from his signature grimdark swagger resulting in his most objectively entertaining movie, and scurried back to formula.

There are some pleasures in formula, of course, and A Working Man is not without them: The cast is enjoying themselves, from Statham and Peña’s early warmth to the deployment of a pair of ringers: Statham’s old pal Jason Flemyng turns up as a pop-eyed Russian capo, and everybody’s MVP David Harbour is here as a war buddy of Levon’s, offering grumpy counsel as only David Harbour can.

But at a running time of two hours, we’re given too much breathing room between kickpunchings to think about how familiar all of this is, and how Ayer isn’t really bringing anything new to the party. The novel was published in 2014, so I’d be curious to know how long Stallone’s been developing it – did he see it as a vehicle for himself at one point? Was it before or after the last Rambo movie, which has a curiously similar story? I do wonder.

Warner’s 4K edition offers no extras whatsoever, just a sterling presentation of the feature in UHD and Dolby Atmos. The absence of supplements feels appropriate to the meat-and-potatoes nature of the picture – there were no extras on the Beekeeper disc either – but it’s also kind of disappointing, since I could watch footage of Statham rehearsing fight choreography for hours on end: He’s so consistently coiled and reserved as an actor that seeing him drop the personal and work with a team as a genuine collaborator is like a splash of cold water. Maybe he’s saving it all for one of those stunt compilation DVDs. I’d watch that.

The Shrouds is now available in a Blu-ray/DVD combo from Sphère Media; you can find it priced quite reasonably at Bay Street Video’s online store. Last Breath is available on Blu-ray from Elevation Pictures in Canada and Universal Studios Home Entertainment in the US.; A Working Man is available in separate 4K and Blu-ray editions from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment.

Up next: Jaws, of course. Needs must.