Reviewed on May 21st at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival – In Competition. 120 Mins
Cast: Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt
Genre: Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Director: David Cronenberg
In Irish Cinemas: Now
At 82 years old, Canadian auteur David Cronenberg remains unwavering in his commitment to the macabre. The pioneer of body horror continues to mine the rich territory of flesh, decay, and psychological unease. His latest film, The Shrouds, is steeped in his familiar obsessions—grief, technology, corporeal transformation—but this time, the alchemy doesn’t reasonably produce gold. Despite drawing an impressive cast—Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, and Guy Pearce—Cronenberg’s latest meditation on death, surveillance, and the digital afterlife stumbles under the weight of its ambitions.
The premise is promising, even provocatively Cronenbergian. Cassel plays Karsh, a bereaved tech entrepreneur whose grief has metastasised into a bold and eerie business venture: GraveTech, a high-concept cemetery that blends memorialization with morbid voyeurism. From the cemetery’s sleek restaurant, patrons can dine while watching loved ones decompose in real-time via embedded screens mounted in tombstones. The bodies are wrapped in high-tech shrouds—possibly radioactive—that render the slow unveiling of bone from flesh into a kind of grotesque performance art. Karsh’s wife is among the deceased, and he proudly displays her decaying form to a lunch guest, as though unveiling a prized art piece.
It’s a chilling setup that captures the director’s fascination with how we technologize and aestheticise grief. However, the narrative quickly becomes tangled. When vandals target GraveTech and suspicious anomalies appear on the footage of Karsh’s wife’s remains, paranoia sets in. Are the lumps on her bones remnants of the cancer that claimed her life, or—as her sister Terry (Kruger) speculates—surreptitious implants placed by medical authorities? Or worse, foreign agents?
From here, the story swerves into convoluted thriller territory. Terry, a conspiracy theorist with a sexual appetite for espionage, draws Karsh into a vortex of suspicion that spans Russia, China, Hungary, and even Iceland. Maury (Pearce), Terry’s ex-husband, is an agoraphobic tech savant who joins Karsh in his investigation, often working from the shadows of Karsh’s minimalist Japanese-style apartment. Maury’s twitchy, subterranean presence is classic Cronenberg—an avatar of obsession and alienation—but his role in the plot remains murky, his motivations half-formed.
Kruger, meanwhile, is given a role that demands frequent nudity, particularly in flashbacks where she portrays Karsh’s late wife. These scenes recall the carnal nihilism of Crash and the cold sensuality of Peter Greenaway’s A Zed & Two Noughts. Yet the film handles these moments with an odd matter-of-factness—until a sudden auditory jolt like the snapping of a hip bone reminds you that, yes, this is still Cronenberg territory.
As the plot unfolds, it begins to feel increasingly far-fetched, even by the director’s usual surreal standards. An AI assistant named Hunny—voiced, in a meta twist, by Kruger—starts to go rogue. A blind woman with a guide dog (Sandrine Holt) appears, cryptic and unexplained, weaving further layers of enigma into a story already thick with abstraction. The result is not the elegant ambiguity of Dead Ringers or the unsettling coherence of Videodrome, but a patchwork of ideas and images that struggle to cohere.
What begins with intriguing provocations eventually descends into a kind of narrative noise. While Crimes of the Future (2022) managed to maintain a sense of internal logic and thematic consistency, The Shrouds becomes entangled in its mythos. The climactic resolutions feel hasty, as though several competing drafts were sutured together without the necessary refinement.
That said, some moments resonate, particularly when the film draws from Cronenberg’s own experience of loss. His wife passed away in 2017, and Karsh’s mourning feels like a direct channelling of that grief. Yet even this emotional core is buried beneath too many speculative tangents.
Ultimately, The Shrouds feels like a film for die-hard Cronenberg aficionados—those who revel in his singular blend of the cerebral and the grotesque, who find fascination even in his misfires. For the uninitiated or the casual fan, however, this is likely to feel more like an intriguing concept undone by its overreach than a fully realised cinematic vision.
Overall: 5.5/10
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