The Shrouds

If you thought “Drop” had dibs on most horrifying meet cute at the movies in 2025, think again, because here comes David Cronenberg. His silver-haired stand-in Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has founded a company called Grave Tech which is introduced during his blind date with Myrna (Jennifer Dale) at a restaurant he owns which is attached to a cemetery he also owns where each body in each coffin, including his late wife Becca’s, is wrapped in a techno-burial shroud providing a view via encrypted apps and screens on the tombstone of the decomposition of your loved one. “Would you like to see her grave?” Karsh asks his date, cuing up a live look-in of his wife’s remains. “That’s an image of your wife’s decaying body,” Myrna says, understandably asking if she might excuse herself for a cigarette. As she lights one up, she remains in the background of the frame as Karsh deliberately takes a step into the foreground, closer to the camera, closer to his wife’s grave, seeming to forget his blind date is even there. It’s a blackly comic image setting up the movie to come: acknowledging the reality of loss in the most subversive way possible while also seeming to entirely evade acknowledging that reality at all. 

Cronenberg has always had a gift for seamlessly incorporating futuristic technology into mundane worlds that feel very much like the present, but rarely has it felt so acute as “The Shrouds.” We live in a world where it can feel as if anything is accessible via our phones so why shouldn’t the deceased be too? It’s striking how plausible this all feels. And though the dead might be happier dead, as the philosopher Harry Lime once observed, what about the living processing the dead? That’s the question, or at least the primary one, driving “The Shrouds.” Yet, even if Cronenberg is famed for his oft-grisly body horror, it’s important to note this premise seemed to stem at least in part from processing his own wife’s death in 2017, and when Karsh views Becca’s remains, it is presented lovingly, and wistfully. The minimalist design of Karsh’s home might be Japanese inspired, but his stated beliefs on the afterlife are less Buddhist or Shinto than Jewish, the gradual separation of the soul from the body, as if providing a window this otherwise ineffable process.

Through this window, however, Karsh also notices strange nodules that have appeared on his wife’s skull since being buried, like post-death tumors, which are impossible, a doctor explains. Where did they come from? And who is responsible for vandalizing his wife’s grave, as well as other graves in the cemetery? Karsh is on the verge of taking Grave Tech global, as any avaricious entrepreneur would, and the list of potential suspects who might want to spoil these plans, or steal the technology for themselves, is endless. Karsh summons his tech-savvy brother-in-law (Guy Pearce) to help, or former brother-in-law, separated from Becca’s sister, twin sister, that is, Terri, played by Diane Krueger in a dual role, a little Doppelganger dynamic cribbed from “Vertigo” but mixed with a splash of necrophilia. 

In fact, is it a spoiler to tell you that Karsh and Terri consummate this twisted attraction? Even if it is, nothing could prepare you for the conflicting feelings that will flood your body when this scene transpires, a fitting, frightening, riveting evocation of the pervasive confusion that grief can bring. The scene is also evocative of the hysterically morbid style of humor coursing through “The Shrouds,” like Terri’s fetish for conspiracy theories, a macabre manifestation of the kink know-nothings seem to get from the fake news industrial complex. But not every joke has deeper meaning. Cronenberg's patented flat dialogue, for instance, creates the most bizarre laughs in the most delightfully odd ways. “I knew I was in trouble when I coughed up my entire esophagus,” will undoubtedly prove the grim gut-buster of the year. 

“The Shrouds” was originally envisioned as a Netflix series and you can sense it, not just in the procession of twists that no doubt would have concluded one episode to set up the next but in the considerable dialogue spent explaining the twists. Unlike a television series, however, “The Shrouds” is not moving toward any kind of ultimate resolution. The conspiracy theories themselves become one more method for prolonging grief, and as its two-hour runtime wraps up, I thought of another Guy Pearce joint, “Memento,” though rather than a circular puzzle snapping into place, “The Shrouds” seems to suggest that sorrow stretches out into forever.