New On Criterion : David Cronenberg Gets Lost in ‘The Shrouds’

David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds — reviewed below — is exclusively available to stream on the Criterion Channel from July 8, 2025.

‘The Shrouds’ is a film about mourning a beloved spouse, a topic that 82-year-old director David Cronenberg knows too much about; he lost his second wife, who was at least a decade younger than him, in 2017. Because this is a David Cronenberg film, there are also plenty of severed limbs and sutures and transgressive sex scenes taking place in gloomily-lit interiors with foreboding electronic music in the background. The movie’s soul feels authentic and lived-in. Ironically, it’s the body that’s awkward.

THE SHROUDS ★★ (2/5 stars)
Directed by: David Cronenberg
Written by: David Cronenberg
Starring: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt
Running time: 119 mins

Our main character and Cronenberg stand-in is Karsh, played somewhat awkwardly by French actor Vincent Cassel, a Toronto-based “industrial filmmaker” who has developed, with the help of a Chinese corporate partner, full-body-camera burial shrouds. Inspired by the death of his late wife Rebecca, Karsh’s shrouds allow grieving family members to watch their loved ones decay in the grave, in real time. It’s a morose concept, but ostensibly it’s a way to help people grieve, though Karsh doesn’t seem to be grieving very well. Dreams of Rebecca, played without any clothes on by Diane Kruger, involve a lot of sex and surgery, two of Cronenberg’s favorite topics.

The Shrouds, like the weird dining chair that Viggo Mortensen occupied in Cronenberg’s last feature, Crimes of the Future, are an innovative piece of future tech; Karsh even calls his company GraveTech, a conceit worthy of a Black Mirror episode. But unlike Black Mirror, and unlike Crimes of the Future, which was equally weird and perverse but also had a gripping plot with a satisfying conclusion, The Shrouds wanders around in its ideas, feeling half-formed. Dialogue is stilted and awkward, almost like it started in English, went through Google Translate into a foreign language, and then back to English again. Karsh depends on an AI character called “Hunny,” who also resembles his ex-wife, but even the human characters feel stiff and AI-life. It’s sex-grief via computer.

Kruger shows up again as Rebecca’s sister, a dog groomer (who used to be a veterinarian) with a bad haircut who is still sexy because she’s Diane Kruger. Karsh gets with her, and also gets with the Korean-Canadian wife of a prospective client, who is a mortally sick industrialist, but we never actually see him, except for in a YouTube video profile. There’s also a sinister doctor who we also don’t see. Unfortunately, we do see Guy Pearce, who gives a ridiculous performance as the emotionally-stunted computer genius ex-husband of the dog groomer. There’s also an extended subplot about how the Chinese are planning to use The Shrouds to create a worldwide surveillance network by implanting spy chips into the decaying bones of corpses. That makes absolutely no sense at all.

We really want the shrouds in action, but we don’t get enough of them. There’s a brief scene where Karsh climbs into a shroud and we see, on the computer, his body peel away, layer by layer, something that was done more effectively in the terrifying, if hacky, Paul Verhoven movie ‘Hollow Man’. But Cronenberg abandons this idea quickly, as though it were distasteful, an odd choice for a director who sees no problem in turning an attractive female AI avatar into a perverted lip-licking amputee, or a disturbingly seductive koala. Instead, we get more Guy Pearce than we want, more plot threads that don’t really resolve, and a lot of scenes of Vincent Cassel awkwardly saying “fuck.”

In the end, the shrouds are what they are, nothing more, unless they’re also a Chinese spy device, which is the least interesting thing they could possibly be. For a master director like Cronenberg, who has more to say about sexuality or death in a bad movie (which The Shrouds is) than most directors can say in a good movie, this is a disappointment, like a dream, even a bad one that ends before we can awaken.