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Yahoo
25-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
With 76% on RT, Is David Cronenberg's 'The Shrouds' Worth Your Time?
Regardless of what might be going on in the world, it's reassuring to know we can still rely on a new David Cronenberg film every few years. The legendary Canadian director essentially birthed the body-horror genre with his third feature, Shivers (1975), and has proceeded over the next five decades to expand and evolve his filmography in a way few filmmakers have. Now, he's back with his 23rd feature, The Shrouds, a classically Cronenbergian tale which tackles complex emotions of grief, surveillance and voyeurism, and, of course, amorous conspiracy theorists. Vincent Cassel stars in his third collaboration with the director following the stellar Russian mob thriller Eastern Promises (2008) and the Sigmund Freud-Carl Jung biopic A Dangerous Method (2011). Here, the actor is styled to look uncannily like Cronenberg, his white quiff and gaunt features so reminiscent that you may for a moment believe Cronenberg has decided to feature himself on the film's poster, but the choice is appropriately thematic rather than eye-narrowingly metatextual. Cassel plays Karsh, an entrepreneur with unlimited financial resources who, four years after the death of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), from cancer, has established GraveTech, a cutting-edge business which allows relatives to view the decomposition of their loved ones in real time. As is well documented, Cronenberg lost his wife of 38 years, Carolyn, to cancer in 2017. He's spoken at length about how this film is an exploration of his own grieving process, but crucially not an autobiographical one. It goes without saying that The Shrouds is one of the director's most personal and most haunting works. It's also one of his most subdued and thoughtful, which adds to its otherworldly a brazenly explanatory opening scene, Karsh tells a blind date (an exceptional Jennifer Dale, nearly stealing the picture in two scenes) that when he watched Becca's coffin lowered into the ground, he felt 'an intense, visceral urge to get into the box with her…I couldn't stand it that she was alone in there and that I would never know what was happening to her.' And while it may sound grisly, business is booming. The garden outside of the ritzy restaurant, which Karsh also owns, is dotted with graves affixed with screens which deliver 24/7 video feeds from within the coffins. 'Can I smoke?' Karsh's date deadpans after being shown a live feed of a skeletal, partially mutilated Becca. As Karsh considers where to open the next GraveTech location, a hack of the company's database and the subsequent vandalism of several graves, including Becca's, sends the entrepreneur reeling. At the same time, he begins noticing new, unexplained growths on Becca's corpse. He enlists the help of both Becca's sister, Terry (also played by Kruger), and her ex-husband, a paranoid techie named Maury (Guy Pearce), who coded GraveTech's security and offers to help Karsh determine from where the hack originated. Karsh shares his theories behind the subterfuge with Terry, who finds herself sexually aroused by the mystery. Meanwhile, Karsh begins an affair with Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the blind wife of a CEO who's pressuring Karsh to bring GraveTech to Budapest. There's also the matter of Hunny, Karsh's AI assistant who's designed to resemble Becca and is likewise played by Kruger in a third role. The Shrouds is Cronenberg's best film since 2005's A History of Violence, and his most classically Cronenbergian film in decades. Beginning with 1996's Crash and culminating with 2014's Maps to the Stars, Cronenberg left behind the scrungy sci-fi conceits for which he's best known and took on a variety of disparate genres onto which he laid his singular stamp. (The sole outlier in this period was 1997's eXistenZ, which was uber-Cronenberg but is regarded as one of his lesser works.) During this time, Cronenberg made some of his most interesting pictures, including Spider (2002), Cosmopolis (2012), and A History of Violence, which is arguably his masterpiece. He returned to his roots in 2022 with Crimes of the Future, and while it was nice to see Cronenberg back in the body-horror saddle, that film felt very much like a retread of ideas he'd explored more furtively in the past. (It was also, narratively speaking, muddled and not particularly gripping.) Even the title and some key elements, though notably not the main plot, were taken from Cronenberg's 1970 second feature. But The Shrouds is a seminal Cronenberg movie, one brimming with fresh and unexplored pathologies. It's thrilling to see the 82-year-old filmmaker working at such a high level, producing work that's as compelling and groundbreaking as his most revolutionary projects. His latest flirts tangentially, almost teasingly, with the body-horror genre, but Cronenberg rejects any explicit move into that territory. As ever, the director isn't content to rest on his laurels; he's also not concerned about giving audiences what they're expecting, a blessing in this time of pre-packaged is a movie of ideas—it is, almost literally, a movie about theories—and Cronenberg certainly has many he wishes to work out. The Shrouds is about our collective relationship with grief and letting go of lost loves; the current state of digital voyeurism and the moralities thereof; the line between clinical trials and human experiments; and how we deal with the inevitable breakdown of our own bodies. It's also, ultimately, the most demented film ever made about a widower finding another chance at love. The Shrouds is knowingly absurd, but never camp, and it's also very funny in that subtle, macabre way in which Cronenberg so excels. If there's any fault with the film, it's that it is slightly overstuffed with characters and notions. But that's also something to celebrate, because the precise film Cronenberg wished to make is up there on the screen. Even if that leads to occasional narrative wonkiness, it's far more thrilling to have his vision presented unfettered. It's worth reiterating how remarkably rare it is to have an iconic filmmaker of Cronenberg's vintage still producing work which feels as vital and cutting-edge as his earliest works. Cronenberg's films have consistently returned to examinations of the human condition—humanity, mortality, love, the soul's relationship with a corporeal being—through body deterioration, from Shivers and Rabid (1977) to The Fly (1986), Crash, and now The Shrouds. He's not a religious filmmaker, but he's certainly a spiritual one. The Shrouds fits snugly in with the director's preoccupations, and it's an exhilarating escalation of his filmography. Here, he's revisiting past ideas with freshened eyes and interrogating new obsessions with a vibrant curiosity which feels like the work of a much younger and hungrier filmmaker. In the fifth decade of his career, Cronenberg is making his most exciting films yet. Here's hoping we get many 76% on RT, Is David Cronenberg's 'The Shrouds' Worth Your Time? first appeared on Men's Journal on Jul 5, 2025 Solve the daily Crossword
New York Times
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Shrouds' Review: For Cronenberg, Grief Is an Obsession
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.
