The Shrouds

David Cronenberg’s latest film “The Shrouds”— presented at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival—is a deeply personal meditation on grief, mortality, and the strange future of death. 

Written in the years following the passing of his wife Carolyn in 2017, Cronenberg takes that emotional foundation further by casting Vincent Cassel as his clear cinematic doppelgänger, reinforcing the intimate, autobiographical nature of the film.

Marketed as a profoundly personal reckoning with grief and a descent into noir-tinged dystopia, “The Shrouds” delivers exactly that—layered with a touch of dark humor. 

While it echoes themes and aesthetics from Cronenberg’s past works—Spider, Videodrome, Naked Lunch, Crash—this film ultimately carves out its own space. It resists categorization, existing instead as a haunting artistic expression of Cronenberg’s personal sorrow. In essence, “The Shrouds” isn’t just a film; it’s a cinematic eulogy, built on the decomposing bodies of its characters, confronting the raw horror of human fragility.

Rather than retelling the plot—complex and tangled as a spider’s web, and easily found in trailers or synopses—I’d rather focus on the film’s core themes and the impression it left on me.

At its heart, “The Shrouds” is a dystopian puzzle, obsessed with grief and the voyeuristic impulse to peer into death itself. In a world increasingly defined by surveillance and digital access, our collective morbid fascination is no longer metaphorical—it’s tangible, and disturbingly real.

The titular “shroud” is a piece of funerary technology: a cloth embedded with countless tiny X-ray cameras, placed inside a coffin to allow loved ones to watch their deceased slowly decompose. 

This invention stems from protagonist Karsh’s (Cassel) desperate longing to lie beside his wife Bekka (Diane Kruger) in death, and has since become the cornerstone of his high-tech mourning empire. At one point, someone draws a comparison to the Shroud of Turin; Karsh casually dismisses it as a fake. The implication is clear: this is the real thing, and it’s horrifying.

There’s no question that death is life’s most difficult truth to face. Losing someone you love is a trauma that defies reason, and the desire to remain connected—even after death—is achingly human. 

But Cronenberg explores this yearning in a deeply unsettling way, reimagining cemeteries not just as places of mourning, but as sites of strange, macabre entertainment. It’s painful, haunting, and brutally honest—perhaps the clearest glimpse we’ve ever had into Cronenberg’s own soul.

Some scenes strike with visceral metaphorical power. In fragmented flashbacks, Karsh recalls tender moments with Bekka as her illness progresses—each embrace a risk, her body growing so fragile that even affection becomes dangerous. 

We often associate love with gentleness, but Cronenberg asks us to reconsider that: what if love is inherently bound to fragility and decay? 

The film forces us to confront that intersection—symbolically, emotionally, and physically—drawing us into the terrifying inevitability of aging and loss. It’s as though Cronenberg is transmitting from the other side of grief, from a place beyond consolation.

The film also evokes comparisons to the real-world work of Gunther von Hagens (a German anatomist who pioneered the plastination technique—a groundbreaking method for preserving biological tissue specimens) and his plastinated corpses, as well as the “peeping tom” impulses common in horror fandom—a desire to look into the afterlife, to see death. And it reminds us that this isn’t just a genre quirk—it’s a societal impulse.

The dystopia in “The Shrouds” isn’t some distant sci-fi future—it feels chillingly close. The film touches on themes of mental illness, addiction, and destructive desire (reminiscent of earlier Cronenberg works), while also weaving in threads of advanced technology, artificial intelligence, international paranoia, and xenophobia. 

Unfortunately, many of these intriguing ideas remain underdeveloped, sketched more than fully explored. At times, “The Shrouds” feels less like a cohesive narrative and more like a collection of powerful notes toward a larger, unfinished project, somehow hidden in the film itself.

One subplot—Karsh investigating an act of vandalism at his futuristic cemetery with the help of his associate Maury—feels more like a device to carry us from theme to theme rather than a driving plot.

The film also quietly raises the idea of how different cultures and religions process death—a subtle layer that, while not heavily emphasized, adds depth to the broader commentary.

As the credits rolled, I found myself asking, “What did I just watch?” But that confusion felt right. 

“The Shrouds” isn’t meant to offer answers. It’s a cinematic expression of grief so personal it resists conventional interpretation. Each viewer will take something different from it—and that, I think, is the point.

One final thought lingered: David’s daughter, Caitlin Cronenberg, made her directorial debut in 2024 with “Humane,” a film very different in plot, tone and style, yet also centered around death. 

It’s hard not to wonder whether these two films, father and daughter’s respective explorations of mortality, stem from the same emotional origin—the loss of a wife and mother. 

If so, that shared grief has birthed two deeply resonant, if radically different, works of art. In the end, “The Shrouds” isn’t trying to comfort—it’s trying to haunt. And in that, it succeeds.