The Shrouds will be released at a date TBD. This review is based on a screening at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. A deeply personal film made in an impersonal style, David Cronenberg's The Shrouds is a creepy, languid, occasionally amusing look at the all-consuming nature of grief.
Starring Vincent Cassel as a 50-year-old tech innovator who bears a striking resemblance to Cronenberg – sporting a jet-black wardrobe and a head of slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair – it unravels the bizarre details of a post-mortem mystery while exploring dreams and waking nightmares about the temporary nature of human flesh. This creates a vital thematic tension, within which The Shrouds lives and breathes: between death and long-lasting forces like love and desire. Inspired by the 2017 death of Carolyn Cronenberg, the director's wife of nearly 40 years, The Shrouds follows Grave Tech CEO Karsh (Cassel), a man trying to revolutionize the experience of mourning.
Karsh, like Cronenberg, knows exactly how silly this sounds, as evidenced by scenes of the widower’s first date in several years. His idea of a romantic gesture, it turns out, is to show the woman he's wooing the grave of his late wife, Becca. Cronenberg's career-long fixations with violence, death, and body horror have not numbed him to the thoughts of the average viewer, whose shock and disgust he makes sure to capture whenever Karsh explains his signature device: a cocoon-like embalming shroud fitted with visual sensors, which al.