The Shrouds

David Cronenberg's latest film "The Shrouds"- presented at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival-is a deeply personal meditation on grief, mortality, and the strange future of death.

Written in the years following the passing of his wife Carolyn in 2017, Cronenberg takes that emotional foundation further by casting Vincent Cassel as his clear cinematic doppelgänger, reinforcing the intimate, autobiographical nature of the film.

Marketed as a profoundly personal reckoning with grief and a descent into noir-tinged dystopia, "The Shrouds" delivers exactly that-layered with a touch of dark humor.

While it echoes themes and aesthetics from Cronenberg's past works-Spider, Videodrome, Naked Lunch, Crash-this film ultimately carves out its own space. It resists categorization, existing instead as a haunting artistic expression of Cronenberg's personal sorrow. In essence, "The Shrouds" isn't just a film; it's a cinematic eulogy, built on the decomposing bodies of its characters, confronting the raw horror of human fragility.

Rather than retelling the plot-complex and tangled as a spider's web, and easily found in trailers or synopses-I'd rather focus on the film's core themes and the impression it left on me.

At its heart, "The Shrouds" is a dystopian puzzle, obsessed with grief and the voyeuristic impulse to peer into death itself. In a world increasingly defined by surveillance and digital access, our collective morbid fascination is no longer metaphorical-it's tangible, and disturbingly real.

The titular "shroud" is a piece of funerary technology: a cloth embedded with countless tiny X-ray cameras, placed inside a coffin to allow loved ones to watch their deceased slowly decompose.

This invention stems from protagonist Karsh's (Cassel) desperate longing to lie beside his wife Bekka (Diane Kruger) in death, and has since become the cornerstone of his high-tech mourning empire. At one point, someone draws a comparison to the Shroud of Turin; Karsh casually dismisses it as a fake. The implication is clear: this is the real thing, and it's horrifying.

There's no question that death is life's most difficult truth to face. Losing someone you love is a trauma that defies reason, and the desire to remain connected-even after death-is achingly human.

But Cronenberg explores this yearning in a deeply unsettling way, reimagining cemeteries not just as places of mourning, but as sites of strange, macabre entertainment. It's painful, haunting, and brutally honest-perhaps the clearest glimpse we've ever had into Cronenberg's own soul.

Some scenes strike with visceral metaphorical power. In fragmented flashbacks, Karsh recalls tender moments with Bekka as her illness progresses-each embrace a risk, her body growing so fragile that even affection becomes dangerous.

We often associate love with gentleness, but Cronenberg asks us to reconsider that: what if love is inherently bound to fragility and decay?

The film forces us to confront that intersection-symbolically, emotionally, and physically-drawing us into the terrifying inevitability of aging and loss. It's as though Cronenberg is transmitting from the other side of grief, from a place beyond consolation.

The film also evokes comparisons to the real-world work of Gunther von Hagens (a German anatomist who pioneered the plastination technique-a groundbreaking method for preserving biological tissue specimens), and his plastinated corpses, as well as the "peeping tom" impulses common in horror fandom-a desire to look into the afterlife, to see death. And it reminds us that this isn't just a genre quirk-it's a societal impulse.

The dystopia in "The Shrouds" isn't some distant sci-fi future-it feels chillingly close. The film touches on themes of mental illness, addiction, and destructive desire (reminiscent of earlier Cronenberg works), while also weaving in threads of advanced technology, artificial intelligence, international paranoia, and xenophobia.

Unfortunately, many of these intriguing ideas remain underdeveloped, sketched more than fully explored. At times, "The Shrouds" feels less like a cohesive narrative and more like a collection of powerful notes toward a larger, unfinished project.

One subplot-Karsh investigating an act of vandalism at his futuristic cemetery with the help of his associate Maury-feels more like a device to carry us from theme to theme rather than a driving plot.

The film also quietly raises the idea of how different cultures and religions process death-a subtle layer that, while not heavily emphasized, adds depth to the broader commentary.

As the credits rolled, I found myself asking, "What did I just watch?" But that confusion felt right.

"The Shrouds" isn't meant to offer answers. It's a cinematic expression of grief so personal it resists conventional interpretation. Each viewer will take something different from it-and that, I think, is the point.

One final thought lingered: David's daughter, Caitlin Cronenberg, made her directorial debut last year with "Humane," a film very different in tone and style, yet also centered around death.

It's hard not to wonder whether these two films, father and daughter's respective explorations of mortality, stem from the same emotional origin-the loss of a wife and mother.

If so, that shared grief has birthed two deeply resonant, if radically different, works of art. In the end, "The Shrouds" isn't trying to comfort-it's trying to haunt. And in that, it succeeds.

Made after losing his wife to cancer in 2017, The Shrouds is a movie where Cronenberg explores the topic of grief. At its best, it shows how the memory of a loved one infects everything in your life afterwards, to the point of losing sight of what's real. Vincent Cassel plays Karsch , an alter ego of David Cronenberg, with uncanny physical resemblance. That the movie uses fantasy to explore the theme of grief in the most conceptual of ways is a strength. It digs, asks questions, and you experience during the movie the confusion that Karsh endures in life. It depicts grief as a form of craziness, almost a mental disease. It's interesting.

At the same time, the whole thing is so conceptual and so dark that it's hard to follow. Maybe I wasn't mentally ready for it. But it felt long, a bit boring, very confusing. I think it's the goal of the whole movie, but you need to be prepared for it when you go in. This is not a movie that will grab you. You will have to make an effort to go through it.

At it's base it's not a terrible movie, the problem is that the base consists of so many ideas and subjects that it's hard not to get lost in all of the mess.

It's a critique of technological advance, AI, privacy & spyware, (experimental) surgeries and health, the Chinese, capitalism, rich people, modern society and so on and so on ... The bad writing doesn't help either, the dialogue can be stupid or just straight up exposition, the story jumps between characters and plot lines in a sloppy way, and I know (or at least think) that some of the dialogue is self aware and doesn't take itself seriously, which made it corny, funny (the audience laughed from time to time) and honestly fun. You can consider this movie a "so bad it's good" movie, at least that's how I see it, I certainly didn't suffer.

It's disappointing to see a talented filmmaker lose his way in one of his works. Unfortunately, that's precisely the problem with the latest effort from acclaimed writer-director David Cronenberg in a film that seemingly had potential but fails to pull it together in the final product. Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel) is a successful Canadian businessman consumed with grief over the death of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), who attempts to cope with his loss by inventing a questionable and arguably macabre technology that allows survivors to peer into the graves of their departed loved ones to, for lack of a better explanation, monitor the deterioration of the deceaseds' corpses. From this premise (and the misleading trailer), one might get the impression that this would be a story with dark, spooky, supernatural overtones. However, as it plays out, the film goes from tangent to tangent to tangent without direction or satisfactory closure, leading viewers on a wild goose chase that, in the end, feels unresolved and incomplete. This alleged horror offering (which is admittedly not particularly scary or engaging) is actually more of a mystery/psychological thriller that ends up weaving a jumbled web of story arcs involving ever-evolving incidents of international business espionage and technological intrigue, the paranoid (and head-scratchingly erotically driven) ravings of Becca's conspiracy theory-obsessed sister, Terry (Kruger in a dual role), the love-starved pining of Terry's unbalanced ex-husband and expert computer hacker, Maury (Guy Pearce), and Karsh's tawdry affair with Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the blind wife of a dying Hungarian corporate magnate (Vieslav Krystyan) who wants to invest in the expansion Karsh's graveyard technology venture, among other puzzling and seemingly unrelated narrative threads. Add to this the picture's glacial pacing and a series of overlong and not especially revelatory dream sequences, and viewers are left with a genuinely bizarre offering. To its credit, the production features some inventive cinematography, a capable collection of performances, and a surprising wealth of inspired and perfectly timed comic relief (truly one of the film's best attributes), but these assets aren't enough to save a sinking ship that plunges deeper and deeper the longer this release goes on, all the way up to its abrupt and unfulfilling conclusion. This clearly is one of those productions that's likely to prompt many audience members to ask, "What was the director thinking?", a justifiable inquiry, to be sure. Cronenberg has produced a fine body of work over the course of his career, but it's nearly impossible to fathom what he was going for here.

Greetings again from the darkness. Director David Cronenberg is renowned for his brand of 'body horror', although his canon has certainly not been limited to the genre. Some of his films across the past fifty years include CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022), COSMOPOLIS (2012), A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005), CRASH (1996), DEAD RINGERS (1988), THE FLY (1986), VIDEODROME (1983), THE DEAD ZONE (a personal favorite,1983), and SCANNERS (1981). With his latest, Cronenberg offers a taste of what he's known for, but mostly focuses on the extreme repercussions of grief.

Grief is an emotion that hits us all hard at some point. Karsh (the always great Vincent Cassel) lost his wife four years ago, and his vision since has been to create a specialized, internet-based cemetery named GraveTech where grieving folks can observe the decay of lost loved ones ... all from the convenience of their iPhone app. Cronenberg regulars should prepare themselves for a film and story that has the feel of a stage production - meaning it's the dialogue and conversation that is crucial here, more so than the visual presentation (although there are a few stellar moments in that area as well).

Diane Kruger plays two roles here. One is Karsh's deceased ex-wife Becca, who we (and Karsh) see in hallucinations or visions. Her other role is as Becca's surviving sister Terry, a dog groomer who is dealing with her own grief. Lastly, a significant role is played by Guy Pearce as Terry's ex-husband, Maury ... a frumpy, paranoid, techno geek. Maury's skills have created Hunny, an AI avatar meant to provide companionship and advice to Karsh. Oh, and Diane Kruger also voices Hunny.

The thrust of the story revolves around the fallout of the targeted vandalism of a few of the gravesites, creating suspicion as to whether it's an international conspiracy or something less provocative. Of course, this is Cronenberg, so a traditional arc is not in the cards. Instead, he provides some stunning visuals (not violence, but definitely a shocking shift from what movies traditionally show) meant to convey the drastic changes that occur with the bodies we too often take for granted, especially when cancer is involved. Politics are touched on, and it's probably the first time you've ever heard a dentist speak the line, "Grief is rotting your teeth." Eroticism and obsession are key motivators here, so if you are willing, the psychological aspects of Cronenberg's film could fill many post-viewing debates. Whether this film strikes a chord with you or not, I remain thrilled and humbled that this octogenarian continues to do things his way.

Opens in theaters on April 25, 2025.