Film
David Cronenberg’s new film – his most personal – brings grief and a surprising touch of metaphysics to his complex exploration of body horror. By Luke Goodsell.
David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds
Everyone deals with death in their own way. Some of us grieve. Others reflect. And if you’re legendary “body horror” auteur David Cronenberg – whose wife of 38 years, Carolyn, died from cancer in 2017 – you make a conspiracy thriller about a high-tech cemetery that allows mourners to watch their loved ones decompose in live-streamed cadaverama.
For a filmmaker who has spent a lifetime mutating men into flies, abdomens into weapons and spinal cords into cybernetic portals, it’s only fitting that it all might come down to the body – even a dead one – as the final site of transformation. The surprise in The Shrouds, the 82-year-old Canadian writer-director’s deeply personal, partly autobiographical 23rd feature, is that this most corporeal of filmmakers has – perhaps in his own grief – permitted a hint of the metaphysical to seep into his world view.
Styled with an uncanny resemblance to Cronenberg, French star Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, a tech entrepreneur whose wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), died of cancer five years earlier and who has since turned his grief into a highly unusual business operation. We first meet him on a blind date set up by his concerned dentist – who informs him, in a classic bit of Cronenbergian deadpan, “grief is rotting your teeth” – at the restaurant overlooking his Toronto cemetery, Gravetech.
Part graveyard, part afterlife art installation, it allows visitors a panoptic window on the deceased – bodies wrapped in camera-equipped burial shrouds in ultra grisly 8K resolution, all controlled via an app on their device. “Everything’s encrypted, pun intended,” he tells his startled date, zooming the camera into the cavities of his wife’s corpse to show off his creation. “Newer resolution, deeper penetration.” Long live the old flesh.
It’s certainly an unsettling extension of our techno-capitalist, everything-on-camera-in-perpetuity present, one in which Karsh – who lives in a Japanese-inspired designer high-rise and gets around in an AI-assisted self-driving car – hopes to expand his ghoulish start-up to a series of locations around the world.
It’s also the kind of utilitarian, vaguely sinister future that Cronenberg once might have speculated. But the veteran filmmaker, who is quick to dismiss his peers’ celluloid nostalgia and who shoots in crisp, chilly digital, is no techno-pessimist: he’s always been as fascinated by the transformative potential of technology as he is with portraying its dangers.
Navigating the “shroud cam” into Becca’s nose cavity, Karsh notices what appears to be an aberrant growth on the bones, tiny polyps that he’s convinced have sprung up post-mortem. Karsh surmises the nodules might be a radioactive effect of the material in the shrouds themselves. But Becca’s surviving twin sister, Terry (also Kruger), a mousy vet turned dog groomer and conspiracy theorist, is convinced her late sibling was being used for possibly illegal medical experiments, and that the growths are tracking devices implanted before her death.
When someone breaks into Gravetech and vandalises the crypts, the plot – and indeed, the plots – thickens. Could it be the work of industrial espionage, military intelligence or the Chinese tech company with whom Karsh partnered to develop the site? Can Karsh trust Maury (Guy Pearce), Terry’s dweeby hacker ex who helped him set up Gravetech, or his slippery AI assistant Hunny (voiced by Kruger), who can morph from cuddly koala to creepy impersonation of his dead wife?
And what of the mysterious, haptically gifted Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), whose ailing husband hopes to be buried in Gravetech’s proposed new site in Budapest?
The latter was part of the pretty hilarious concept for The Shrouds when Cronenberg first pitched it as a television series to Netflix, with Karsh visiting a different city each episode to open a new Gravetech. “How dark do you want to go?” the filmmaker asked the streaming giant: the answer, evidently, was “not very”. What I would’ve given to have seen Karsh show off a new Saint Laurent designer shroud – one of this year’s hottest movie looks – each week.
For a film steeped in grief, The Shrouds can be archly comedic, toying with our sense of reality and leaning into a laundry list of Western culture’s current bogeymen, from Russian hackers to aggrieved incels and digital pranksters.
“These things you’re saying, I find them exciting,” Terry says to Karsh at one point as he explains his wilder theories. “Conceptually, intellectually, conspiratorially?” he asks. Her reply is vintage Cronenberg, sex and death wrapped in a screwball punchline: “They’re making me hot.”
If 2022’s wickedly funny Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg’s first feature in nearly a decade, played as something of a career greatest hits, then The Shrouds reminds us that the tag “body horror” has always been something of a misnomer, a term not so much inaccurate as it is reductive.
In the body, Cronenberg finds not horror but a kind of beauty and resilience, even as it becomes a battleground for medicine and technology. Infused with its creator’s loss, The Shrouds contains some of the most tender scenes of Cronenberg’s career – and I say this as someone who tears up every time Jeff Goldblum’s transmuted insect pulls the barrel of the shotgun to his head in The Fly. Karsh is visited in his dreams by Becca, who progressively loses body parts, has her limbs lined with screws and steel plates and bears the kind of stitches that Frankenstein would consider too much. Yet the sequences are warm, funny and almost unbearably poignant as a result.
Everything is mutable in The Shrouds: the body, identity, even narrative. It’s not a spoiler to note that the film opens and closes in dreams or that Karsh’s lucid communion with Becca seems no different from the reality – or unreality – of the world around it.
Cronenberg has never been a dimensional tripper in the way of his late peer David Lynch, and he certainly would be the last to entertain thoughts of the supernatural. “If you’re an existentialist like me or an atheist like me and like Vincent’s character, you don’t have religion to fall back on,” he told Variety of the grief underwriting the film.
Even so, The Shrouds seems to acknowledge, in its shapeshifting astral passages, the possibility of – well, not exactly the beyond, but at least another plane of existence. Maybe death isn’t final so much as another of the universe’s narrative red herrings.
“Are you still alive?” Karsh asks Becca at one point, deep in one of his dreams – or so we think. Her reply – perhaps the three most accurate words in human experience – is one of the most moving lines in a movie with no shortage of emotional heft: “I don’t know.”
The Shrouds is screening in cinemas nationally.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 2, 2025 as "Fly on the pall".
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