Cronenberg Returns

THE SHROUDS (2025): I haven’t liked a David Cronenberg film since EASTERN PROMISES (2007) and was especially disappointed with his 2022 film CRIMES OF THE FUTURE, which was supposedly a return to the director’s classic style (it wasn’t). And while it was difficult avoiding reviews for his latest (which hipster filmfest reviewers began spoiling over a year ago), I am happy to say I enjoyed the director’s talky but deep meditation on death and loss, inspired by his wife’s passing back in 2017. Vincent Cassel is great as Karsh, the head of a hi-tech company who have invented a special burial shroud that allows people to watch, via a phone app, their deceased loved one’s bodies decaying in the grave. Clients can also view their late loved ones on screens affixed to tombstones where the bodies are buried in a special cemetery, which Karsh not only owns, too, but runs a swanky restaurant on its grounds. Things start getting even weirder when Karsh discovers odd growths on his wife’s bones, which his tech-savvy brother-in-law claims aren’t natural, but may have been deliberately put there. Conspiracy theories abound, and Cronenberg has a great time bringing all types of theories into play, making the viewer fear his own phone halfway through this gloomy, slow burn. Diane Kruger (of INGLORIOUS BASTERDS fame) is great in a dual role both as Karsh’s sister-in-law, and she also shows up as his wife Becca in the film’s surreal body-horror moments, including a sex scene that made the entire audience wince. Sandra Holt plays Soo-Min, a blind potential client who eventually develops a relationship with Karsh and is part of the film’s low key but bizarre ending that brings Bava’s LISA AND THE DEVIL (1974) to mind. THE SHROUDS will surely divide Cronenberg fans and may turn some viewers off: it’s a slow burn, and forces the viewer to contemplate disease and dying, not typical subject matters for a Saturday afternoon matinee. I was fascinated not only with everything the film explores, but that this is how Cronenberg has publicly chosen to grieve his wife’s passing. It’s obvious actor Cassel was made up to look like Cronenberg, and halfway through the film I became confident we have been allowed to take a glimpse into the actual mind of a filmmaker who has been delivering some of the strangest, more transgressive films for the past 50 years … and that mind is a scary place to be.