Before it strangely peters out, lost in its own conspiracies, The Shrouds registers as a mournful, if macabre, meditation on losing a loved one—as only writer-director David Cronenberg could manage. A bodily minded filmmaker like no other (Videodrome, The Fly, Crash, and most recently Crimes of the Future), Cronenberg here focuses on a recent widower and tech-cemetery pioneer named Karsh (Vincent Cassel). Karsh has developed a device—the shroud of the title—that enfolds a buried body, allowing survivors to intimately monitor their loved one’s decomposition via a multidimensional video feed. Karsh is his own client; four years after cancer took his wife (Diane Kruger), he now spends many of his lonely hours on the GraveTech app. (There’s also a digital picture display on his desk that flips among images of her body in various stages of decay.) Thanks largely to Cassel’s earnest, vulnerable performance—“It makes me happy,” Karsh says at one point. “It has drained away that fluid of grief that was drowning me”—this all registers as not only intellectually plausible, but devastatingly authentic to the mourning experience. The movie’s most arresting moments, both visually and psychologically, are dreams Karsh has of his wife appearing in their bedroom, her naked body desecrated by the surgeries she suffered as part of the cancer treatment. Unfortunately, this sense of sorrow fades after Karsh’s corporate cemetery is vandalized and his GraveTech network is hacked. Much plot kicks in, but the emotional potency dissipates. With Guy Pearce as Karsh’s paranoid tech advisor; Sandrine Hoult as the sight-impaired wife of a dying billionaire looking to invest in GraveTech; and Kruger also playing the sister of Karsh’s late wife and the voice of his suspicious digital assistant.
(4/29/2025)
