May contain spoilers.
“How dark are you willing to go?” the protagonist asks on screen, echoing the overall theme of the movie. And in true Cronenberg fashion, the darker, the better.
The Shrouds (2024) is a thought-provoking and disturbing film written and directed by David Cronenberg. It premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival and was released in theatres in April 2025. It is a deep delve into the anatomy (quite literally) of grief and loss, strongly featuring the body horror genre that Cronenberg is well-known for, most famously in the iconic 1986 movie The Fly.
Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, a grieving widower who has recently lost his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) to cancer. In his grief, Karsh creates GraveTech, where the deceased are buried in shrouds with x-ray cameras embedded inside, allowing the living to monitor their loved ones’ corpses within the grave via livestream. However, following the desecration of a number of graves, including that of his late wife, Karsh, with the aid of tech guru Maury (Guy Pearce), investigates the incident amidst paranoia and conspiracy theories.
Karsh seeks comfort in 2 women: Terry, his dead wife’s twin sister, also played by Kruger, as well as Soo-Min Szabo (Sandrine Holt). Both women remind him of his dead wife, and we see his endless loop of grief as reality and dreams of his late wife are blurred into one. In the end, it is an acknowledgement that his current and future entanglements will still be coloured by his love for his wife.
One might say there is a perverse romanticism in how his grief plays out: not just in his desire to be buried next to his wife in death, but in his obsessive need to “be with” her in death, to experience the decay of her corpse in real time.
If the viewer is expecting a neat and tidy ending that wraps up all the loose ends into a pretty little bow, let me dispel you of that notion: there will be none. As Cronenberg himself says, “The death of a loved one is impossible and meaningless.
The Shrouds is now showing at Luna Palace Cinemas