The Shrouds (2025)

4 Stars (out of 4)

After Grave

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Master of body-horror David Cronenberg returns with one of his most potent movies in years, The Shrouds, a paranoid, tech-based sci-fi thriller that is bold enough to deal in uncertainty and illusion.

Karsh (Vincent Cassel) is a successful businessman, grieving deeply over his late wife Becca (Diane Kruger). He runs a cemetery with a unique option. Corpses are wrapped in tech-based shrouds, and cameras are planted within the graves. This way, loved ones can watch the progress of decomposition on small screens located in the headstones.

One day, the cemetery is vandalized. Headstones are knocked over, and the system is hacked, locking Karsh out. He calls on his brother-in-law Maury (Guy Pearce), a computer expert who was once married to Becca's paranoid, conspiracy-theorist sister Terry (Kruger). Maury begins to posit several theories as to what happened and why.

Meanwhile, Karsh's world becomes more complex as he dreams about Becca succumbing to sickness and becomes involved with the blind Soo-Min Szabo (Sandrine Holt). Worse, his AI assistant Hunny (voiced by Kruger) begins to act strangely.

The Shrouds falls in place, thematically, with Cronenberg's most famous movies (Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, etc.), with a clear definition of what makes good "body-horror," i.e. some kind of unholy blending of organic flesh and outside technology.

The movie starts strongly with the disquieting idea of being able to watch rotting corpses within the grave, but continues with the medical dismantling of Becca's body (she keeps returning to his nightmares with body parts missing, stitches, braces, etc.).

But perhaps its most relevant theme has to do with how technology warps, bends, and outright throttles human thought. The movie is full of conspiracy theories, but no actual theories. Nothing can be taken as fact.

Cronenberg assembles a great cast here, especially Guy Pearce, who brings a kind of weird humor to his character. The filmmaker's visual style is as familiar as ever, viewing startling imagery in a clinical and controlled manner, and not particularly interested in being scary, the way one might expect a horror movie to be.

At this stage, a movie as unyielding as The Shrouds will probably not win any new fans for the director. Longtime fans, however, will be thrilled.