When people say that David Cronenberg makes body horrors, what they really mean is that they are horrified by their bodies. Cronenberg, by contract, is fascinated by bodies. By their potential, by their limitations and extremities, by what they can become and how they degrade. His films are often about death – the moment at which the body can no longer support this abstract concept we call life – but that’s where they end. It’s an oddity, then, that the Canadian director of The Fly and eXistenZ has never gone to the space beyond. No, no one is expecting this expert in the corporeal to suddenly get all metaphysical about the afterlife. Instead, The Shrouds looks at what is after life – burial, decay, grief.
That is the business of Karsh (Cassel). Cronenberg reunites with his Eastern Promises star to cast him as the owner of GraveTech and inventor of the shroud. It’s not any funeral wrap, as he explains to increasingly horrified blind date Elizabeth (Dale), but a complex sensor array that allows the family to see the body in the grave as it decays. In Karsh’s case, it’s the body of his late wife, who is interred, wrapped in one of those shrouds, in the cemetery right behind Karsh’s swanky restaurant. For Karsh, it’s a way to both remain connected and also allow separation, to let people see that what made their loved one who they were has gone. Alternatively, it turns the mourner into “a corpse voyeur,” as Karsh’s sister-in-law Terry (Kruger) dubs him. That’s one of three roles that Kruger plays here: as Terry, as the voice of Karsh’s personalized and flirtatious AI assistant Hunny, and as his late wife Becca, who comes to Karsh in dreams and nightmares covered in scars and losing limbs. Her appearances are not gory but clinical, the result of having been through extensive cancer treatments. Constantly naked, she’s how Karsh remembers her, sexual and loving yet mutilated and despairing.
This is, after all, all about Karsh’s attempts to control his loss through technology. He’s the perfectly manicured and elegantly dressed visionary balanced by Guy Pearce as Maury, his former brother-in-law and the actual engineering whiz behind the shrouds – the Wozniak to his Jobs. Karsh is ideal casting for Cassel, his black-suited elegance and understatement making him both futurist and mourner. That’s the inherent tension of The Shrouds, that the Panglossian optimism of technological development is always going to smash face-first into the grave some time. Just ask Jobs. No, wait, you can’t.
If The Shrouds fails, it’s because its folds are too deep, too dense. That’s a predicament that may spring from the film’s genesis as a TV series. Possibly if Cronenberg had the time to build out the themes of global technological conspiracy and theological grief, then potentially the longer format would render them less cursory than how they’re handled here. The appearance of Sandrine Holt (Chinese Puzzle, Mr. Robot) as the wife of a potential investor opens up another defining aspect of Cronenberg’s fascinations, as many of his most recent films have dabbled in the world of corporate conspiracy. There’s an iciness at play, but that ice is melted by tears.
After all, The Shrouds is arguably Cronenberg’s most introspective film. His earlier work was driven by fascination, fetishization, and a puckish humor. All those elements are present here, but muted, restrained, and ultimately under an overwhelming sense of futility, as Karsh uses the shroud tech to retain a detachment from his grief. There’s a deep poignancy there that feels in conversation with – and almost a rebuttal to – Cronenberg’s last film, 2022’s Crimes of the Future. Both films seem directly influenced by the death of the filmmaker’s wife in 2017 from cancer. Yet while Crimes processed that experience as an act of transhumanist evolution, The Shrouds lets the grief, the real lived experience of witnessing death, inform its most honest moments.
This article appears in April 25 • 2025.
