Directed By David Cronenberg

Starring – Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce

The Plot – Karsh (Cassel), an innovative businessman and grieving widower, builds a device to connect with his dead wife (Kruger) inside of a burial shroud.

Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, adult language and some violent content.

The Shrouds Trailer #1 (2025)

POSITIVES

In a lot of ways, “The Shrouds” serves as the most vulnerable film directed by Cronenberg since 1979’s “The Brood”, as a result of his own real life wife’s untimely death in 2017, and while the film is littered with the same Cronenberg familiarities that we’ve come to expect, in everything from gruesome body horror to a reveling in the bizarre, it’s in those broad strokes of empathetic longing and remorsefulness where the movie finds its most consistent beauty and rhythm, serving as an artistic coming to terms for the heralded director in ways that allow him to almost literally step in the shoes of Cassel’s protagonist. What’s evidential from the opening frame is how Karsh is meant to emulate Cronenberg himself, particularly in everything from the slicked back grey hair that David has always sported, to Karsh’s own established history producing industrial films, and these aspects as well as the depth of the darkly devastating exploration that envelopes Karsh truly cements something personally endearing to the movie’s direction, serving as something far more vital and rewarding to my investment than anything that the developing mystery of these graveyard vandals during the inferior second half could capably conjure. Beyond this, the script features some effortless transitions in flashback sequences pertaining to Karsh and his deceased wife, which surprisingly utilizes her as more of the person she was before her debilitating condition, rather than the plagued and immobile victim that we’re used to in other films. It’s a refreshing vantage point into the lives of this married couple before death and grief overtook their once peaceful existence, and while they’re used to establish the confines of regret that Karsh lives painfully through, they are still among the movie’s most important sequences, especially with razor sharp editing in the lack of dimensions between fantasy and reality that took me a few seconds to define just where we were at, whenever Karsh’s mind gets the better of him. In addition, this is another eerily uncomfortable presentation for Cronenberg that lends itself effortlessly to the internalized depression and reeling of its established protagonist, both with moodily accentuated lighting that compliments Douglas Koch’s scintillating cinematography, as well as an ominously foreboding score that constantly kept my anxieties peaked even during exposition-laced interactions between characters that essentially preheats the oven before cooking on high. These aspects go a long way towards captivating the kind of unnatural essence that David constantly paints among the various worlds in his films, and with the thematic impulses here pertaining to death, conspiracies and even necrophilia, it isolates the characters in their own web of devastatingly internalized traumas, crafting a world that is still familiar to each of them, but one that feels much colder and impersonal to those left behind. As for the aforementioned body horror component that most fans of Cronenberg grew up adoring, it’s far more meticulously reserved than I was expecting towards a movie pertaining to these themes, however with the use of some noteworthy special effects of practicality, does make its presence felt during the most revealing scenes in the uncovered pasts of these characters, sure to satisfy even the most hardcore of horror hounds, even if it’s far from the most exploitative film that Cronenberg has ever helmed. Lastly, the performances of Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger deserve plenty of praise towards helming the empowering grief of these respective characters, with Cassel earning a far greater dependency towards a hundred percent of the movie’s focus. As previously established, Karsh serves as the artistic manifestation of Cronenberg here, so his characterization is fleshed out far more expansively than anyone else in the picture, however it’s Cassel’s emotional reservation that outlines a quiet storm from within his candid portrayal, with enough bottled intensity to feel like it could blow at any given moment. Kruger actually has triple duty here, not only as both of the twin sisters, but also the vocals behind Karsh’s artificial intelligence avatar, Honey, and while that alone cements Kruger’s irreplaceable value to the film, the dexterity among personality of those twins is where she really does her most mesmerizing work, with Becca enacting a softer vulnerability to her inevitable prognosis, while Terry exudes a fiery fearlessness that often makes her the combustible element of any environment she graces, allowing Kruger to make each of them stand out as completely different characters, even if they share the same facial likeness.

NEGATIVES

As is the case with most Cronenberg films as of late, the script makes some unfortunate decisions with its exposition and development that continuously grinds its pacing and endearment to a screeching halt, leaving this a more than tediously convoluted engagement that does error on the side of boring on more than one occasion. For starters, the conversations between characters continues to be David’s personal weakness, where unnatural structuring lacking any kind of meaningful momentum or rhythm is used as nothing more than periodic exposition dumps meant to forcefully hold the hand of its audience, and while information in backstory is especially important for a world defined as this strangely bizarre and unnatural, the long-winded emphasis between these characters made it difficult to remain faithfully invested to them, especially considering the emphasis in what’s discussed makes it so easy to predict just what’s coming. Speaking of predictability, the movie’s aforementioned mystery behind who destroyed this cemetery is a fascinating angle, but executed so convolutedly in ways that entirely took me out by the movie’s midway point, before an eventual reveal too political to wipe away any sentimentality of this once tender story. Twists and turns to any story help to grow the intrigue of its unpredictability factor, but as the scope of this devious plan grows bigger with each passing scene and uncovered truth, Cronenberg starts to lose a bit of focus with the real heart of this narrative, and it leads to a climax within its third act that not only dramatically overstays its welcome in reaching for an impactful ending that never properly materializes, but also brutalizes the movie’s pacing to such arduous levels that you can’t help but feel dejected by, making this a film that feels every inch of its ambitious two hour runtime. Finally, while most of the technical choices add an integral value to the moodily atmospheric presentation that Cronenberg is going for, the C.G utilized during graveside sequences spoil a budgetary cheapness to the movie’s quality that serves to be distracting to the interpretation, where it feels like all of the budget was put towards the trio of bodily horror sequences that effectively inscribed a visceral morbidity. For my money, I wish the production would’ve used practical effects to emulate a human body, as it would’ve granted necessary heft and influence to the deteriorating cavity that the audience see before them, but unfortunately the artificial route gives off the impression of this feeling something like early 90’s desktop graphics, where the look feels far too artificial to feel rewarding for the loved ones who seek out this unorthodox way of family burial.

OVERALL
“The Shrouds” isn’t quite the fully fledged return to form that passionate fans have been waiting over a decade for from David Cronenberg, but it is a tenderly provocative film about emasculating grief that the director lifts from the untimely tragedies of his own life. While the film flourishes with stoic performances and bitterly digesting bodily horror in doses, its creative idea grows exhausted by a convoluted mystery and exposition-heavy dialogue that directly interjects itself between the audience and their entertainment value, leading to an inconsistently conflicting engagement that nearly buries something so poetically profound.

My Grade: 6.2 or C-