‘The Shrouds' Review: For Cronenberg, Grief Is an Obsession

New York Times

17-04-2025

In David Cronenberg's latest film, 'The Shrouds,' the lines between life and death, emotion and pathology, biology and technology, become blurred. Even the movie's tone lands in a liminal space where gravitas slips into comedy — I couldn't help but snicker when someone tells the main character, 'Karsh, don't crash!'
A dry macabre humor has long run through Cronenberg's work, and the uncertainty behind some of his intentions here creates thought-provoking ambiguity. Since an important source of inspiration was the death of Cronenberg's wife from cancer, in 2017, are we really supposed to find this funny? I would argue, yes — among other details in keeping with the Canadian director's approach, a woman is revealed to find conspiracy theories sexually arousing — but there is still enough doubt to mess with viewers' heads.
The aforementioned Karsh (an understated Vincent Cassel, in his third Cronenberg movie after 'A Dangerous Method' and the terrific 'Eastern Promises') is a Tesla-driving Toronto entrepreneur. His business, GraveTech, involves burying the dead in shrouds that transmit images to screen-embedded headstones. At his cemetery, you can, in effect, watch a livestream of a decomposing body. (This is not so far-fetched, considering recent developments in both wearable technology and invasive voyeurism.)
Karsh is personally invested in this corpse cam because his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), died of cancer four years earlier. She is buried in one of his shrouds, and he can check on her decay's progress.
This we all learn in a surreal introductory scene in which Karsh explains GraveTech to a lunch date, Myrna (Jennifer Dale), at a restaurant overlooking his wired-up cemetery. He even shows her Becca's feed, which might not beat brandy as a digestif.
Before long the plot properly kicks into gear. Thanks to his technology's high resolution, Karsh notices odd growths on Becca's corpse. They don't look organic, so then what are they? Who put them there? Shortly thereafter, the graves are vandalized. Again: Who? Why?
With each new plot development, the movie lurches in a different direction before then abandoning it. 'The Shrouds' is about a disturbing new gizmo. No, it's about grief, a force as mighty as it is paralyzing. Wait, it's about surveillance and espionage, and could involve Russia or China.
Or maybe it is about fixating not so much on the dead as on death itself, and the need to accept it. A hint perhaps: In 2021, Cronenberg, with his daughter, directed a minute-long film, 'The Death of David Cronenberg,' in which he kisses then hugs his own corpse.
Amid scenes that are plain baffling (we expect those from Cronenberg), there are plot switchbacks and red herrings that don't add up. Still, the movie keeps returning to reality and fantasy, fetishism and desire, and the moment when love becomes obsession becomes stalking. That last progression, in particular, feels like an inevitability in the world Karsh inhabits.
Many of those themes are common in Cronenberg's movies, and if anything, 'The Shrouds' is almost conventional compared with its perversely erotic predecessor, 'Crimes of the Future' (2022). Karsh's relationships with women follow a pattern; he seems to experience them solely as his wife's proxies. As in Hitchcock's 'Vertigo,' romantic fixation is a necrophiliac fever dream.
Those women include Becca's look-alike sister Terry (Kruger), a vet turned dog groomer with whom he has a push-pull connection; and the blind Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), a prospective client's wife. The scariest of all is an avatar: Karsh's artificial-intelligence assistant, Hunny (Kruger, again), a creepily perky glorified emoji who knows all, controls all, and might be even more invasive than the Russian secret service.
It makes sense, then, that the key counterpoint to our lead is Terry's ex-husband, Maury (Guy Pearce, in yet another memorable supporting turn). An old-fashioned hacker who clickety-clacks away on his computer, Maury is as greasy and rumpled as Karsh is glossy and smooth. They feel like two sides of one coin, though. 'The Shrouds' is overstuffed and often clunky, but if there is a takeaway, it's that some men engage with technology to disengage with reality. And that is more unsettling than any body horror.