Dir. David Cronenberg, Canada/France, 2024, 120 mins, in English
Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt
Review by Colin Dibben
Karsh (Cassel) is a grieving, widowed tech entrepreneur who has designed a smart mesh that can be used to cover a corpse and relay real-time images of a loved one as he or she disintegrates in the grave.
The Shroud is more coping mechanism than product, as Karsh misses his wife Becca (Kruger) terribly. He hallucinates memories about the course of her fatal cancer and starts a closer relationship with her sister Terry (also Kruger). This brings him into conflict with Terry’s ex-husband Maury (Pearce), who was chief developer of the Shroud product. A new investor, Soo-min (Holt), enters the picture. She wants Karsh to develop his product in Hungary. The two of them start a sexual relationship.
When an act of sabotage occurs at the prototype GraveTech laboratory-cum-cemetery, Karsh uncovers several real and imagined conspiracies relating to data steals, Russian and Chinese investors and hackers and the farming of cyber-human hybrid entities using cadavers. Can Karsh see the wood for the trees, discover what is really going on, take control of his grief and learn to live freely again?
The Shrouds hits expected notes of portentousness but also a sublime silliness: isn’t the Shroud the world’s least wanted product? Who actually wants to see a loved one rot away? I assume Cronenberg is making an allegorical point: the super rich will continue to foist their obsessions on the rest of us as product. That doesn’t make the concept here any less silly.
The body horror element is fantastic – all the more so for being credible: Kruger’s Becca haunts the film in stages of visceral amputation and her own horror and fear at what is happening to her body is palpable.
The thriller element starts well. For the first half of the film you are engrossed in working out what is going on. But Cronenberg’s sense of dramatic resolution hasn’t improved and his resolutely character based storytelling through dialogue comes across as heavy handed. The first half is great but the second half feels largely like redundant repetition.
Cronenberg tell his story in a pretty un-cinematic fashion. There are lots of close-ups of characters spouting terrible ‘on the nose’ dialogue, most of which is pretty unnecessary, as the conspiracies and situations described pretty much come with the dystopian near-future territory. You can see the resolutions coming, but they are developed in so much detail that any dramatic life is sucked out of them.
For example, there is much screen-time exposition of the possibility of Chinese and Russian hackers being behind all the chaos. But surely, their existence in our own real world suggests that this is not the stuff of outlandish theories, not even conspiracies – a tech entrepreneur who didn’t know they might impact his project even if things went to plan wouldn’t be doing due diligence?
The Shrouds is in cinemas from 4 July 2025.
