My quick rating - 5.9/10. David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds is one of those films where simply knowing who’s behind the camera sets your expectations, and probably filters who should even watch it. If Cronenberg’s brand of clinical body horror, icy emotional undercurrents, and existential musings isn’t your thing, there’s little chance this one will win you over. But if you’re drawn to his work, this is a fascinating, if uneven, late-career piece that seems to wrestle with mortality as much as the director himself does.
The film follows Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a wealthy businessman, inconsolable after the death of his wife. In his grief, he’s developed a controversial technology that allows the living to watch their deceased loved ones decomposing in their graves, an unsettling concept that Cronenberg treats with a kind of intellectual curiosity more than outright horror. When Karsh’s wife’s grave, along with many others, is desecrated one night, he becomes obsessed with finding out who is behind it.
It’s not hard to see how personal this project is for Cronenberg, who reportedly drew on the loss of his own wife. That somber, introspective energy permeates the film. Unfortunately, so does a bit of clutter. The Shrouds feels loaded with stray thematic threads: critiques of privacy-invading tech, A.I. dependence, capitalism, modern surveillance states, plus jabs at the Chinese, the Russians, and the lifestyles of the rich. There’s a subplot involving Karsh’s personal AI assistant that’s undercooked—just one of several ideas that might’ve been more compelling with deeper exploration.
Still, even with its meandering approach, there’s something engrossing about the movie’s cool, calculated tone. Cronenberg paints a world of self-driving cars and phone screens that feels depressingly plausible, yet almost drained of life. Underneath it all is the point, of course: our technology, our shiny devices, still serve our very human, often shameful desires. Whether that’s to feel close to the dead, to voyeuristically intrude on private spaces, or simply to dull our grief.
The acting keeps this from tipping over into pure tedium. Vincent Cassel gives Karsh a hollow-eyed vulnerability that makes his obsession with his wife’s grave both sad and disturbingly believable. Diane Kruger is equally up to the task. The supporting cast similarly grounds what could’ve become a detached philosophical essay.
This is ultimately one of those movies that might miss as pure entertainment, but a Cronenberg “miss” still lands higher than most directors’ average. The slow burn won’t work for everyone—there were certainly stretches that flirted with boredom—but the emotions at the core are authentic, the sci-fi concepts hauntingly real, and the personal undercurrents hard to shake. If this does turn out to be Cronenberg’s final film, it’s a fittingly morbid yet thoughtful meditation on death, technology, and the strange ways we try (and fail) to keep loss at bay.
I am sure JustWatch will have some options soon. Amazon will have this on July 7th, 2025.
https://jackmeat.com/the-shrouds-2025/
No comments:
Post a Comment