The Shrouds (2025)
Directed by: David Cronenberg
Premise: A widowed entrepreneur (Vincent Cassel) has developed technology that allows mourners to view their deceased loved ones as they decay in the grave. After the cemetery is vandalized, he discovers a conspiracy involving spyware and personal intrigue.
What Works: David Cronenberg is best known for making movies about the intersection of the human body and technology such as Videodrome, The Fly, and 1996’s Crash. Cronenberg continues that theme in The Shrouds and which comes across as a capstone to his body of work. The Shrouds links the themes of body and technology with mortality. Bodies are wrapped in a special burial garment and interred beneath headstones with video monitors so that mourners can see a live image of the deceased. The central idea is classic Cronenberg and it dramatizes the overlap of the body, technology, and the social experience. The film explores what it means to mourn if we are constantly enabled to see (and in a sense never really leave) our deceased loved ones. The feeling of grief is quite strong in this film and that is largely due to Vincent Cassel’s performance in the lead role. We can see the pain in his posture and line readings. There is a lot else happening in The Shrouds. Cassell’s character suspects that his graveyard technology has been hacked and the film visualizes the way each of us can unwittingly become vectors for surveillance.
What Doesn’t: The Shrouds has too much plot getting in the way of the story. There is a lot happening here: Cassel’s character grieves over his late wife, he ponders his complicated relationships with his former sister-in-law, her ex-husband, and a prospective business partner, and he investigates a technical and political conspiracy. It’s a little too much. The story is crowded with too many subplots and relationships all competing for screentime. The Shrouds has a surplus of dialogue. This has been a consistent flaw of David Cronenberg’s late period and The Shrouds’ overstuffed story requires the movie to spend a lot of time on exposition. All the talking comes at the cost of communicating the story visually. The spyware subplot especially suffers as it remains entirely abstract. None of the various story elements are followed to a conclusion which is especially evident in the ending. The film doesn’t reach a climax. It just stops. There is no sense that the characters have reached any sort of epiphany and the film fails to pull its various pieces together. This isn’t a matter of ambiguity or nuance; the movie is incomplete.
Bottom Line: There are lots of interesting things happening in The Shrouds. Too much, as it happens. The movie buries its most compelling ideas and the storylines are so underserved that nothing comes to a satisfying or meaningful conclusion.
Episode: #1046 (May 4, 2025)