David Cronenberg Grapples With Advancing Decay in The Shrouds

At 81, David Cronenberg is interested in how we decay. And so is Karsh (Vincent Cassel), who has taken his sorrow over the death of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) and turned it into a tech entrepreneurship. A clear reckoning with the death of his own wife seven years ago, Cronenberg fashions Vincent Cassel into his own image (literally—hair and all) as a man who copes by exploiting his own grief and putting it on display for the world to see. Karsh learns from his dentist that grief is even rotting his teeth, and in the opening scene of The Shrouds, we are told how coping with loss changes our bodies. It’s more stylistically subtle than something you’d see in Videodrome, but the two films are inextricably manifestations of the same mind, the same wrestled thoughts.

Karsh is the CEO of GraveTech, which created groundbreaking technology called “shrouds”: radioactive cloaks fashioned in the vein of the Shroud of Turin, that ensconce a corpse in its grave and allow the grieving to view the body as it slowly disintegrates. If you think the little viewing windows affixed to headstones are silly enough, fortunately there’s also an app you can download to your phone, allowing the living to watch their loved one’s body decay anywhere they go. Karsh and his tech are both innovative and controversial, drawing criticism from eco-groups over possible environmental poisoning, called by some a “techno atheist infidel.” And it prematurely alienates Karsh from a blind date with a woman who immediately feels pressured to see her date’s dead wife’s headstone already implanted with a second viewing window for Karsh’s eventual deceased body to lie next to her. It’s a difficult expectation to play second fiddle to that degree.

A conspiracy plot is what propels the narrative forward, although “propel” might be something of an overstatement. The day after his failed date, Karsh discovers that vandals have destroyed his cemetery, including Becca’s headstone in their path of destruction. At the same time, in his observations of Becca’s body he notices that strange calcifications have appeared all over her skeleton. Karsh’s sister-in-law and Becca’s sister, Terry (crucially, also Kruger), muses that the growths look like tracking devices, which furthers Karsh’s paranoia. Becca had apparently been receiving “experimental treatments” from her shifty doctor as she succumbed to the cancer that killed her, disfiguring her and causing her to lose her left breast, her left arm, and rendering her bones as brittle as glass. Now, just as Karsh needs to question him, that shifty doctor has fled to Reykjavík, Iceland—the proposed site for another one of Karsh’s newfangled cemeteries. Is this all a part of something bigger and further flung than Karsh can possibly imagine? Or is it all just pure coincidence? Or something more?

Karsh enlists Terry’s tech-nerd ex-husband, Maury (Guy Pearce), who had previously designed Karsh’s Siri-adjacent AI assistant, Hunny, to look and sound just like Becca. Maury looks into meddled security footage to find the source of the attack on GraveTech, which leads to a hacker group who dabbles in cryptic Viking runes. Maury, a nebbish type, is grieving a loss of his own, the loss of his marriage with Terry. Meanwhile, Karsh is courting a prospective new body for his site in GraveTech Hungary, while literally courting the body’s blind widow, and fielding a series of dreams between him and Becca where she leaves their bedroom nude only for her to return progressively mutilated by her treatments. This description of what’s happening in the film makes The Shrouds come across more active of a film than it really is. Like Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel before them, both Crimes of the Future and The Shrouds are narratives inverted. All the assumedly propulsive action happens off screen, but the scenes that unfold before us are of the characters only talking about it, reacting to it. Updates surrounding Karsh’s hackers play out in conversations where Karsh reveals what he’s learned has happened elsewhere. We never see what happened to Becca during her treatments, only the way her body has changed after them.

Incidentally, David Cronenberg’s late work is more interested in what we don’t see than in what we do. The director had disappointed some longtime fans with 2022’s Crimes of the Future; a return to his “horror” roots after two full decades working in dramas like Eastern Promises and Maps to the Stars. The irony was that Crimes of the Future was yet farther from what likened fans to his earlier work than even Eastern Promises. A film that could be uncharitably characterized as “people having conversations in different rooms,” Crimes of the Future laid the groundwork for a continuation of that very style of narrative filmmaking in The Shrouds. Cronenberg once again fuses this quiet, skeletal approach to storytelling with his classic body horror preoccupations, as he imagines a new form of technology that allows us to view our loved ones as they gradually rot back into the earth.

The plot of The Shrouds is convoluted and difficult to follow when we’re only being told things instead of shown them. But the plot is also virtually non-essential, and the screenplay strikes as a bit slipshod at times. By the end of the film, it becomes clear that the course of events, why they may or may not have happened, and the utter lack of catharsis provided is almost like a bleak joke. Yet as Cronenberg tends to be, The Shrouds is darkly funny as well—a FaceTime call in Karsh’s Tesla (difficult to parse if this is endorsement or satire) between Karsh and Maury sees Maury’s face covered in blood, after which he explains to a concerned Karsh that “I always bleed when I’m stressed.” The entire concept of attaching digital viewing screens to headstones linked to apps allowing one to be a “corpse voyeur” everywhere they go is pure capitalistic tech-dystopia parody. It’s reminiscent of something comedian Conner O’Malley might concoct in a sequel to his short film Endorphin Port. Hunny, who already appears to know too much, becomes more and more sexual towards Karsh, which is absurd in her Memoji form even before she transforms her avatar into a cuddly koala. And the entire concept of scenes unfolding along the lines of “Wow, that thing that just happened is so crazy” when the audience couldn’t actually see anything that happened is just blatantly very amusing in how it toys with preconceived expectations of how a movie should play out.

And in spite of “nothing really happening” in The Shrouds, there is a hypnotizing sensation to watching the film and most of Cronenberg’s other dramatic work as well. It’s an uncanny rhythm in the way characters speak to one another, juxtaposed against this otherwise quiet, unremarkable world that surrounds them. This quiet is also throbbing with tension, inextricably erotic, leading to sex scenes in The Shrouds that are, to no one’s surprise, genuinely sensual, from a director who has spent most of his career articulating the horrific eroticism of the human form. Still, in these later films, everything feels wrong even if we can’t necessarily see what might be causing it. Perhaps that’s the experience that comes with grief: Suddenly, the world feels wrong even though it appears like nothing has changed. Of course, the world of The Shrouds isn’t necessarily normal, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. Underneath the layers of farcical hacker-conspiracy, Cronenberg’s film is in part an uneasy grappling with how one deals with loss in a world where our pain is increasingly encouraged to be exploited.

It’s also a film made by a filmmaker in his twilight years, as he considers what will happen to his own body after he’s gone, considers what is currently happening to the body of his deceased wife and what his body is without hers. To have your decades-long romantic partner taken from you and to have to continue living on, trudging to your own eventual conclusion without them by your side. What do you do? Do you suffer in silence, do you share your pain with others; do you use your pain to capitalistic ends? Whatever choice one takes, that pain changes you, just as treatments change the body of a cancer patient. The Shrouds might not be Cronenberg’s most accessible or cohesive film, but it’s just as muddled as the process of coping with mortality in a world where we are pulled steadily further from what makes us human.

Director: David Cronenberg
Writer: David Cronenberg
Stars: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt
Release date: Jan. 22, 2025

Brianna Zigler is an entertainment writer based in middle-of-nowhere Massachusetts. Her work has appeared at Little White Lies, Film School Rejects, Thrillist, Bright Wall/Dark Room and more, and she writes a bi-monthly newsletter called That’s Weird. You can follow her on Twitter, where she likes to engage in stimulating discussions on films like Movie 43, Clifford, and Watchmen.