The Shrouds, 2025.
Written and Directed by David Cronenberg.
Starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders, Jennifer Dale, Steve Switzman, Ingvar E. Sigurðsson, Jeff Yung, Eric Weinthal, Matt Willis, Al Sapienza, and Vieslav Krystyan.
SYNOPSIS:
Karsh, an innovative businessman and grieving widower, builds a device to connect with the dead inside a burial shroud.
In a world that becomes increasingly unhinged and unstable, more dependent and parasocial, and more addicted to technology by the day with unethical, predatory companies already looking into monetizing grief and loss (those uncomfortable advertisements about uploading the voice and likeliness of a loved one to a server to have them around forever as a source of comfort when they are no longer among the living), legendary writer/director David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, centered on a technological entrepreneur’s graveyard with built-in digital screens atop the tombstones, powered by high resolution cameras buried underneath and synchronized to a user’s app so that they can voyeuristically observe decayed remains of said loved has bone chilling, eerie, and instantly sets the stage for a thought-provoking, profound deep dive into modern-day grief and death.
However, The Shrouds zags in several other directions, also functioning as a tech-thriller laced with conspiracy theories that eventually become a kink among certain characters, it’s also about Karsh’s (played by Vincent Cassel, who resembles David Cronenberg, which tracks considering this is a personal film) relationship with his late wife Becca (Diane Kruger) with body-horror flashbacks depicting the effects of the cancerous-like disease that took her life and made her bones so brittle that, at one point, she breaks a hip after encouraging him to lean up against her in bed and be intimate.
Becca’s dog-grooming twin sister, Terry, is also played by Diane Kruger, which doesn’t mess with Karsh’s mind as much as one might think, having vowed to respect her wish to never get together with her. More startling is that Karsh has an AI assistant named Hunny who not only looks like a younger Becca, but is also voiced by Diane Kruger, tapping into the uneasy, questionable avenues someone will take to hold onto a resemblance of someone they loved, fake or fabricated.
Getting back to the zagging, one of those gravesites is vandalized, with much of The Shrouds focused on Karsh bringing in his computer hacker brother Maury (Guy Pearce) to break into the server he created and search for breadcrumbs that might provide clues regarding what group was responsible and for what cause, whether it be environmentalism, general activism disapproving of the high-tech gravestones, or political. It’s also worth mentioning that Maury was once the significant other of Terry, at least until exhibiting startling behavior that factors into other elements of the narrative.
Nevertheless, Maury is aware that Terry and Becca look alike, and he comes across as slightly paranoid that Karsh got together with her as a grieving mechanism. Meanwhile, Karsh has also noticed inexplicable growths on Becca’s decayed skeletal corpse, leading him to wonder why and if it is associated with the treatment she received. He is also looking to expand his graveyards, working together with the blind Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), who knows her husband could die at any day. As such, conversations regarding grief emerge.
There is so much going on here that it’s as if the film pulls the viewer in a different direction every five minutes. Fortunately, David Cronenberg conjures up hypnotic images, sometimes set to profoundly sad scenes. Almost everything to do with Karsh and Becca is devastatingly portrayed, but with nuance. It’s akin to watching a romantic partner slowly die, except through reliving a visceral look at the most damaging aspects of the disease. When Karsh tells a poor soul blind date that the day Becca was lowered into the grave, he wished he could have got inside there with her, it’s establishing weirdo behavior (which gets weirder once he shows her the digital component of the graves) and blowing up the meeting to disastrous proportions, but also intensely bittersweet and moving.
David Cronenberg also successfully ties together the many themes at the film’s core, often to unsettling effects. However, aside from who is responsible for vandalizing the graveyard, and details about Becca’s past that open the door to numerous other conspiracies, they gradually start to feel as if they are slipping too far away from what The Shrouds initially interrogates. That said, some payoffs are satisfying and smartly play into something more significant and terrifying about the modern digital age. In contrast, others add to a mystery that feels forced but might yield more substance on a rewatch.
Overall, the journey comes across as a bit of a disjointed mess, but the destination is a hard-to-shake, mostly logical conclusion to the explored themes. Even when the film does feel narratively chaotic, it has that Cronenbergian originality and boldness alongside a transfixing pull, and knows what it wants to say.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Critics Choice Association, and Online Film Critics Society. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews and follow my BlueSky or Letterboxd
