The Shrouds (Cronenberg, 2024)

"How dark are you willing to go?"

David Cronenberg crafted a deeply personal film that will haunt you long after the credits roll.

Written by Mariane Tremblay

After the death of his wife to cancer, Karsh (Vincent Cassel, who channels a Cronenbergian style) partners with a Chinese tech company, Shining Cloth, to develop a radical new technology: interactive tombstones that project images of the deceased in 4K resolution. Paired with advanced burial cloths equipped with X-ray cameras and sensors, allowing the living to witness, in real time, the decomposition of their loved ones. Driven by grief and a visceral need to stay close to his wife Becca (Diane Kruger), Karsh’s invention blurs the line between mourning and obsession, raising disturbing questions about memory, closure, and the ethics of surveillance. What begins as a meditation on loss takes a turn only David Cronenberg could imagine—blending grief with conspiracy, sex, and our increasing entanglement with technology, shaping not only our ability to process death but also our perception of reality itself.

Drawing from his own experience of losing his wife eight years ago, Cronenberg crafted a deeply personal film that lingers long after the credits roll. It’s the kind of film that sticks with you, haunting your thoughts well after you’ve seen it (I found myself falling asleep thinking about it, only to wake up still thinking about it). At its core, The Shrouds is an exploration of grief—the difficulty of letting go of the person you were once most intimate with, and ultimately, of their body. Grief is something many struggle to comprehend, especially when it involves losing a partner—the person you shared your body, your life, and your soul with. To lose the touch, the voice, the laughter, the essence of someone who defined your world, feels like a profound emptiness. 

It’s when one of GraveTech’s cemeteries is vandalized and tombstones are destroyed (including Becca’s) that the film takes a darker turn—paranoia, conspiracy, and surveillance move to the forefront. What began as a means of preserving memories—and in this case, the dead—raises questions. As the boundaries between hallucination and reality blur, Karsh's grip on what’s real begins to slip. His invention, initially designed to preserve memories and proximity, spirals into a nightmarish tool of manipulation and control. The line between mourning and obsession becomes increasingly indistinguishable, forcing Karsh (and the audience) to confront the terrifying consequences of tampering with death and memory, and turning mourning into a technological spectacle. 

I must admit, I was completely fascinated by everything this film explores (and still am)—particularly how we, as complex individuals, confront death, grieve the loss of a partner, and attempt to move forward. As Karsh spirals into two psychosexual affairs—one with Becca’s twin sister, Terry (also played by Diane Kruger), and the other with Soo-Min Szabo (Sandrine Holt), the wife of a potential GraveTech investor—it becomes increasingly clear that he’s losing his grip on reality. These relationships don’t offer healing but instead underline just how deeply he's trapped in his grief, unable—and perhaps unwilling—to let go of the past, to let go of his wife, of her body.

The Shrouds is the kind of film that doesn’t reveal all its layers—you’ll likely need a few days to process it. But that’s what makes Cronenberg’s work so compelling. Ultimately, it challenges our deepest fears about love, loss, and the lengths to which we’ll go to hold onto those we’ve lost. It’s a haunting meditation on the nature of grief in a world controlled by technology, asking whether we can ever truly move on—or if, in our attempt to preserve the dead, we only risk losing ourselves in the process. Its dark, unsettling vision resonates deeply—not only because of its disturbing premise, but because it taps into something deeply human.

The Shrouds is now playing in theatres. 

Photo credits : Janus Films