THE SHROUDS - Mark Reviews Movies

The Shrouds, Sideshow / Janus Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 17, 2025

There's a rawness of emotion and ideas at the start of writer/director David Cronenberg's The Shrouds. It follows a man whose wife has died and concerns his inability to cope with her death. The premise goes beyond that, however, because our man is still obsessed with his dead wife in a way that extends past memory and being stuck in grief. He wants to maintain a physical connection to her, and thanks to a device he created, this man is able to watch a live feed of his wife's decomposing body, at any angle and captured in the highest available resolution, in the grave whenever he feels like it.

Of course, Cronenberg has a lengthy track record of making movies about the grotesque and the macabre—about bodies and minds crumbling, deteriorating, twisting, and being demolished for a variety of reasons. This one might contain the most literal, confrontational, and unsettling distillation of those ideas within a single premise. It is very much about death—not as metaphor or a showcase for grisly special effects, although this one does contain the latter, to be sure. At first, the movie is upfront and to the point about the weight of grief and, in this case, a most morbid effort to hold some control over and possess some level of certainty about the fact of death.

For whatever reason, Cronenberg cannot maintain a similar degree of control and certainty over this narrative. That might be part of the point, of course, because any effort to comprehend or overcome death throughout human history has been for naught.

Is that the reason this screenplay becomes bogged down in a vast conspiracy that neither anyone within the story or even Cronenberg himself seems capable of understanding, or has the filmmaker simply hit the all-too-familiar and understandable wall of coming up with a noteworthy premise and not being sure what to do with it? The experience of the movie feels more like the latter option.

Up to a point, though, there is real potential and disturbing potency to the material. Our mourning widower is Karsh (Vincent Cassel, whose appearance in the movie bears some resemblance to Cronenberg, adding to the thought that the setup at least is personal for the man). He's a successful businessman who has started a company called Grave Tech, has an exclusive plot in a Toronto cemetery for its clients (as well as an adjoining restaurant with a depressing view), and plans to open more gravesites around the world.

The centerpiece of the company, though, is its high-tech burial shroud, which captures full, three-dimensional imagery of the corpse wrapped inside it, akin to an MRI or a CT scan but with far more detailed results. Cronenberg introduces the technology and Karsh's obsessive nature with a scene of the character on what becomes a most uncomfortable blind date. It's one thing for the woman to wonder, if the date goes well and some relationship comes of it, how she could measure up to Karsh's late wife. It's a whole other level of intimidation to know that the guy, as he proudly spins and zooms in on the image of the corpse on his cellphone, still has this intimate and physical connection to the wife's dead body.

As for the resulting narrative of this setup, it's pretty much split in two. The first details the relationship between Karsh and his wife Becca (Diane Kruger), both when she was alive, mainly as her body deteriorated to a devastating type of bone cancer, and now in her death.

It's a poignant and upsetting depiction of helpless in the face of illness, as Becca endures several injuries and body-altering surgeries, and grief, as Karsh keeps an AI that looks like his wife and wraps himself up in one of those shrouds—trying to feel what it might be like for his wife, while still knowing that she can't actually feel anything. Meanwhile, the introductions of Becca's twin sister Terry (also Kruger), the ex-wife of Karsh's tech whiz friend Maury (Guy Pearce), and Soo-min (Sandrine Holt), the blind wife of a dying tech mogul who is considering a shroud, forces us to confront the possibility that Karsh might want to replace his wife or that the need for control on display with the shroud could extend to his personal life, too.

Much of this is secondary, however, to the main through line of the plot, which sees the high-tech cemetery plot vandalized by anonymous intruders, the shroud technology hacked, and Karsh left to figure out who is behind the attack on his innovation, as well as his connection to Becca's body, and what their plan is. It's a wide, seemingly incomprehensible web that raises the specters of environmental activists, conspiracies involving at least international governments' trying to establish a clandestine surveillance apparatus, hidden agents and missing people among Karsh's associates, and one final hint that makes us question the entirety of the plotting that has come before it.

Nothing about that plot, though, is as compelling as the core idea of The Shrouds or its observations about the all-encompassing nature of grief. There's enough complexity in those elements to make the convoluted conspiracy plot feel like a distraction and a letdown.

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