MOVIE REVIEW: The Shrouds (Dir. David Cronenberg, 2025)

'Grief is rotting your teeth'

There are doppelgänger’s aplenty in the work of David Cronenberg. One might recall the twin Jeremy Irons that skulk through 1988’s, Dead Ringers, or the displaced Debbie Harries that cross between the real and the virtual in: Videodrome (1983). However, it is in, The Shrouds, that the legendary filmmaker has pushed these warped identities to an extreme which seems to move beyond the frame of the film itself.

One might not immediately think of David Cronenberg as a ‘personal’ filmmaker, his career being mostly associated with horror cinema, but which has branched out in the 21st century into something much broader and more fluid, with films such as: A History of Violence (2005), and Cosmopolis (2012). The Shrouds, however, is a different kind of beast entirely. Cronenberg has admitted publicly that the film is an attempt to come to terms with the death of his wife, Carolyn Zeifman, in 2017. With that in mind, the film’s tale of the recently widowed, Karsh (Vincent Cassell), a tech mogul who seeks to reinvent the funeral industry using technology which allows the family of the deceased to watch over the decaying bodies of their loved ones 24/7 on a mobile phone app, is obviously one with grief at its very centre. As the film develops, it becomes clear that, not only is Karsh completely unable to let go of his dead wife, showing her corpse to women he dates, and keeping pictures of her skeleton on a digital slideshow photo frame. Cronenberg is also canny enough not to limit this obsession to the material world, as the deceased Becca penetrates his dreams and fantasies, even during his sex with other women. Diane Kruger (National Treasure, Inglorious Basterds) plays a triple role, first appearing as Karsh’s sister-in-law, Terry, then as the voice of Karsh’s AI assistant, Hunny, and finally as, Becca in the fantasy. Around this central concern freely floats these hints of a conspiratorial complex which goes beyond Karsh and which threatens him financially and personally. This plot thread, centred around the destruction of the GraveTech graveyard and the hacking of their systems, a darknet war between Russia and China for CyberTech’s data, and the appearance of strange nodules on Becca’s skeleton, is deliberately obtuse. Much like the underlying detective mystery in 2022’s, Crimes of the Future, this plotting is secondary and more useful to the film as a means of exploring its primary concerns than it is a riddle to be solved.

While the review form is limiting in what it allows me to discuss, I would be remise to ignore the two features of, The Shrouds, which struck me greatly on this viewing. The first of this is the way in which Vincent Cassell, as Karsh, is so obviously modelled on David Cronenberg himself. His hair, his clothing, his speech, all deliberately bring the director to the screen. Yet, it is not Cronenberg. It resembles a Cronenberg mask spread against all of the simmering difference and violence we find lying beneath everything we find in Vincent Cassell both in character and in our cultural memory. Obviously, this sign posts towards the director wanting us to understand the film in terms of his personal grief. However, I do believe that there is something much more complex at play. What may help us to elucidate this problem is to examine it through the lens of this second striking element of the film - which is the way in which key portions of the film’s reality are mediated entirely by screens. Karsh watches his wife’s body decompose through his iPhone. He communicates with characters through the view screen on his Tesla car, and through video calls. The details of his brother-in-law, Maury’s (Guy Pearce), madness is communicated through a secretly filmed video. Even the small nodules that have appeared on Becca’s corpse, which only fuel Karsh’s paranoia, appear to be computer simulated, or, at least, that is what a potentially sinister doctor claims. What all of this mediation creates is barriers. Barriers which blur the lines between the real and the virtual, and, when this occurs in a film which is already hinting towards some paranoiac conspiracy, all of reality comes into question. The sensory organs which allow us to interact with the virtual world, the computer, the AI assistant, the very Shroud technology employed by Karsh’s GraveTech, become untrustworthy and the sense of that reality falters. These is seen in two particular scenes, one in which Karsh’ AI assistant, Hunny, is hacked and begins to appear as a threat, and another when the grave set aside for Karsh is occupied by another body despite the virtual screen baring his name. Why I think that it is important that these complex, often untrustworthy, mediating systems are significant, in a film where the protagonist appears as an avatar of the director himself, is precisely because it makes the viewer aware of this chain of obscured information. Famous director David Cronenberg makes a film about a man who looks like David Cronenberg, who then uses the medium of video to create an endless connection to their dead wife as the very machine-human interfacing relationship, that Cronenberg has spent much of his career exploring, malfunctions around them. Even in the world in which Cronenberg has full control, death has eradicated, or, at least, disorientated, all systems of order. The film itself is made unstable, and the director has crossed over into it. It is striking, and I must find time later this year to theorise this in greater depth when the film makes it to home video.

What I would like to bring to light in this conclusion is the significance of fantasy in the film. Kash is visited by dreams, or possibly memories, of Becca throughout the film. These scenes functionally work to develop their relationship and to leave breadcrumbs for the conspiratorial narrative. They are strange, and painful, often depicting the dismembering of the body and the loss of intimacy. They were, for me, the most viscerally upsetting scenes in the film. Yet, one cannot deny that it is these scenes, with their lack of mediation, take up the appearance of reality moreso than any of the scenes which occur in Karsh’s waking life. That he enters into one of these scenes whilst having sex with his sister-in-law, whom is identical to his wife, is not a coincidence. It is a connection to the reality of his past brought about by a traumatic repetition. It traps him. One can only imagine a version of this film that takes a turn even further towards Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). The appearance of a new woman, the blind wife of a dying millionaire, Soo-Min Szabo (Sandrine Holt), offers the opportunity for Karsh to liberate himself from his obsessional attachment to the past. However, the more I dwell on the film, and its ending, I do not believe this is true. As a female parallel to Kash (or an inversion of Becca), her blindness giving her the aesthetic quality of a blank screen for Kash to project onto, what Szabo allows Kash to do attempt a complete repetition again elsewhere. A new woman with the fantasmatic deceased wife hiding deep underneath. Is that not the life of the widowed filmmaker? The next woman always contains the imaginary woman which haunts the system.

I haven’t been able to fully elucidate everything that is at work in, The Shrouds. I haven’t even really managed to scratch through a lot of its surface, and I would like to come back to do an even deeper analysis at a later date. But, I do believe that, The Shrouds, is an excellent work. This is not simply David Cronenberg is remixing his classical concerns, but one in which he is attempting to forge a new direction within his unique milieu. There are the usual features of Cronenberg’s filmography which will be difficult for non-fans: the strange acting, the lack of an obvious sense of propulsion, and, more recently, the devotion to the off-putting alien quality of purely digital filmmaking. Yet, for those of us who are longtime fans, I would consider this new outing as much see. It is dark, and it pushes the viewer towards ideas which many will not be comfortable encountering. For this reviewer, it was an experience all-together moving and thought provoking.

Ryan Sweeney (@thecautiouscrip / insta:teawithzizek)