Melissa Anderson
Memento mori, memento amori: in David Cronenberg’s latest, a bereft widower mourns his dead wife with an invention that enables the monitoring of her decaying body.
Vincent Cassel as Karsh and Diane Kruger as Terry in The Shrouds. Courtesy Sideshow and Janus Films.
The Shrouds, written and directed by David Cronenberg, now playing in theaters in New York and Los Angeles, opens nationwide April 25, 2025
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Since becoming a widower, David Cronenberg—whose wife of thirty-eight years, Carolyn, died of cancer in 2017; they met on the set of his 1977 movie, Rabid, for which she was a production assistant—has written and directed two films that glorify a devoted couple. Crimes of the Future (2022) revolves around the creative and romantic partnership of Saul (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux), whose métier is extreme body-art exhibitions in which she removes, via a remote-controlled scalpel in front of rapt audiences, her darling’s “neo-organs,” body parts that regenerate. His vulnerability in these bizarre extravaganzas—supine, Saul has his torso sliced open—and his trust in Caprice make her love for him infinite. Her deep, sometimes deranging attachment to him ennobles this otherwise stiff, absurd film.
The Shrouds, which premiered at Cannes last year, is likewise a portrait of conjugal constancy—though, this time, one of the spouses is dead, one of two overtly autobiographical elements in Cronenberg’s latest. The other is the styling of Vincent Cassel, who plays Karsh, the bereft Toronto-based widower protagonist: the actor sports a distinctive quiff (mostly salt with a few dashes of pepper) that replicates the director’s. As with its predecessor, The Shrouds is strongest when the focus is on a single person’s emotional surfeit—specifically, Karsh’s fathomless grief and the extremes to which he will go to stay connected to his wife’s corpse. It is most enervating when it devolves into a conspiratorial thriller lousy with red herrings.
Diane Kruger as Terry and Vincent Cassel as Karsh in The Shrouds. Courtesy Sideshow and Janus Films.
Among the more memorable proclamations in Crimes of the Future is “BODY IS REALITY,” text that flashes on TV monitors before one of Saul and Caprice’s surgical performances. The Shrouds offers a corollary to that statement in an early scene when a dentist tells Karsh, “Grief is rotting your teeth.” At the time of his oral checkup, four years have passed since Karsh’s wife, Rebecca (played in flashbacks and dream sequences by Diane Kruger), succumbed to breast cancer. Once a producer of industrial videos, the mourning man now devotes all of his time to the enterprise he began to memorialize his beloved: GraveTech, a system that lets viewers see, on screens embedded at the tops of headstones, the decaying bodies of their dearly departed. These gruesome visuals are made possible by another of Karsh’s inventions, ShroudCam, a network of recording devices in the metallic burial cloths that blanket the deceased.
Karsh explains, and later demonstrates, all this technology to a blind date (Jennifer Dale), with whom he breaks bread at the sleek, soulless restaurant he owns. It’s part of the cemetery complex of which he is coproprietor, where Rebecca lies six feet under and a plot next to hers awaits him. Wholly indifferent to his date’s increasing horror (and, soon enough, her abrupt exit) as he zooms in on his dead wife’s skull, Karsh delivers a perverse yet profoundly touching requiem: “I’m in the grave with her. I’m involved with her body the way I was in life, only even more. And it makes me happy. It has drained away that fluid of grief that was drowning me. Killing me.”
Vincent Cassel as Karsh and Diane Kruger as Terry in The Shrouds. Courtesy Sideshow and Janus Films.
With his long, haggard face, Cassel, in his third film with Cronenberg (following 2007’s Eastern Promises and 2011’s A Dangerous Method), adroitly conveys his character’s acute suffering even when not doing much more than simply staring straight ahead. Karsh has not fully retreated into his desolation; nattily dressed in slate-colored blazers worn over thin cashmere sweaters, he throws himself into his work, hoping to expand GraveTech to other countries. But he seems most content when alone at home, where he can indulge in his morbid rituals, such as donning one of his tech-enhanced shrouds—his body now rendered as an écorché—as a way both to feel closer to Rebecca and to anticipate his own demise.
Vincent Cassel as Karsh in The Shrouds. Courtesy Sideshow and Janus Films.
These depictions of anguish have a searing intensity, reminding us that they were created by someone with fresh experience of unmooring sorrow. The Shrouds would make for a fascinating double bill with The Brood (1979), another Cronenberg film rooted in a painful personal experience: his rancorous divorce from his first wife and their bitter custody battle over their daughter. While the earlier film is far more outlandish—a florid exemplar of Cronenberg’s signature body-horror, The Brood features murderous mutant dwarves, terrifying skin growths, and a sickening birth scene from an external amniotic sac—the outré components are in service to, not a distraction from, an indelible portrayal of very real feelings of hopelessness and rage.
Vincent Cassel as Karsh and Guy Pearce as Maury in The Shrouds. Courtesy Sideshow and Janus Films.
In The Shrouds, the paranormal is supplanted by paranoia. Checking in on Rebecca’s cadaver, Karsh is alarmed by tiny nodules in her skull that he hadn’t noticed before. He mentions this to his wife’s twin sister, Terry (Kruger again), who is convinced those abnormalities are tracking devices implanted by Rebecca’s nefarious oncologist. Soon after this meeting with his sister-in-law, Karsh gets word that nine graves, including Rebecca’s, have been vandalized at his cemetery. Although no one claims responsibility for the sabotage, Maury (Guy Pearce), Terry’s unstable ex-husband and an unofficial IT director for Karsh, insists the crime is part of an espionage/surveillance plot by the Chinese government. Or is it the Russians? Or Icelandic eco-terrorists? Or has the Maury-created Hunny, Karsh’s AI assistant (voiced by Kruger), gone rogue? And what does Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the wife of a dying Hungarian auto-parts magnate, really want with Karsh and GraveTech?
Vincent Cassel as Karsh and Sandrine Holt as Soo-Min in The Shrouds. Courtesy Sideshow and Janus Films.
All of these plot twists are depleting diversions and come to nought, though they do provide the backdrop for some of Cronenberg’s most infelicitous dialogue, such as Maury saying—twice—that something is “duck soup.” (The filmmaker is genius at generating punchy catchphrases, like “Long live the new flesh!” from 1983’s Videodrome, brilliance that does not always extend to capturing the diction of everyday speech.) Each of these conspiratorial set pieces, in which a character, sometimes Karsh himself, natters on about how X surely accounts for Y, takes us away from a much more riveting, hushed spectacle: a man, ravaged by heartsickness, who can go on living only by obsessing about death.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press. A collection of her film criticism, The Hunger, will be published this year by Film Desk Books.