The Shrouds Review: A Subtle Thriller from David Cronenberg

      Note: This review was initially published as part of our coverage of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. The Shrouds will be released in theaters on April 18.

      David Cronenberg’s films frequently envision a future where technology intertwines deeply with our collective psyche. Now, 55 years into his remarkable career, could that future have finally arrived? In Cronenberg's latest film––the polished yet chaotic The Shrouds––there are two hardly speculative ideas: the possibility of creating an AI chatbot that resembles a recently lost loved one and, more significantly, the notion that a company might choose to install high-definition cameras around our dearly departed before they are buried, letting us check in on their decaying bodies with a simple app.

      If that seems somewhat lacking in ambition for the Canadian director, Cronenberg––whose wife Carolyn passed away in 2017 after battling cancer––has his rationale. With “grief being eternal,” as he mentioned prior to the Cannes premiere, it certainly resonates throughout The Shrouds: a sci-fi conspiracy thriller that explores the mourning process, providing enough depth, style, and humor to overlook its tangled narrative and insignificant loose ends. These range from eco-terrorists and mysterious interests from China and Russia to an unseen antagonist and the idea that a stylish undertaker, who places monitors on gravestones, could be viewed as a low-level tech guru.

      The film features Vincent Cassel (his hair slicked back like the director) as Karsh, the founder of GraveTech and owner of The Shrouds, a posh restaurant where diners fortunate enough to secure a window seat enjoy a view of the graveyard where Karsh’s wife is interred. Her name is Becca, portrayed in Karsh’s necrophilic dreams (where she still shows the scars from her advanced cancer) by Diane Kruger, who also plays Becca’s identical twin sister, Terry––an arrangement familiar to fans of Vertigo––and voices Hunny, the AI chatbot that Karsh confides in.

      Karsh aims to expand the business to Iceland and Budapest, but environmentalists are already resisting; when a group of activists ransack the cemetery where Becca is laid to rest, hacking into the system and thwarting Karsh’s morbid fixation on monitoring her body, he begins to suspect a more sinister plot. He also starts dating a glamorous blind woman and brings in Terry’s downtrodden IT-ex-husband (Guy Pearce, tasked with explaining the film’s convoluted plot) to help unravel the mystery.

      After his return to form with Crimes of the Future, it is surprising that much of The Shrouds feels underwhelming: the awkward sexual encounters, the overall incoherence, and the atypically uninspired technology (though the gothic concept of using a blanket of cameras to cover the corpses was appealing). That said, as a contemplation on death, grief, cancer, and desire, The Shrouds offers more humor than anticipated––notably, a hilariously misguided first date introduces Karsh’s restaurant/graveyard concept––and the director’s signature clean aesthetic remains hard to rival. Though it pales in comparison to his other works, The Shrouds represents Cronenberg in Dead Ringers mode, contrasting his characters’ slippery Freudian themes with surgically precise imagery (cinematography by Douglas Koch) and a subtly haunting score by Howard Shore. The film made its debut last night in Cannes, just 24 hours after Caroline Fargeat’s very Cronenbergian body-horror film The Substance made waves at the festival, less than three years following Julia Ducournau’s impactful showcase. Cronenberg still impacts viewers in a unique way.

      The Shrouds premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.