The Shrouds (2024) Review

After premiering at last year’s Cannes Festival, the latest offering from David Cronenberg is now in theaters. While it certainly contains a lot of the thematic obsessions we’re used to seeing from the Canadian auteur, this film also feels like a fresh turn for the iconic filmmaker. Karsh’s paranoiac search for the culprit who vandalized his hi-tech graveyard is filtered through themes of globalization and digitization, but the haunting dreams of his dead wife provide an almost Lynchian tone that balances all the heady aspects with a somber sense of mystery that ultimately allows the movie to transcend the trappings of its plot. It’s messy, at times convoluted, unevenly paced, but still a very deep dive into what it means to grieve in contemporary society. In other words: CRONENBERG IS BACK, BABY!

It’d be easy to discuss how the seed of this film was planted by Cronenberg becoming a widower—he himself has mentioned its autobiographical impetus in several interviews—but I also think the political moment undoubtedly made an impact. Karsh is constantly wondering if, thanks to his questionable list of investors, Chinese or Russian spies could be trying to use GraveTech as a way of building a covert spy network in the West. It’s a plotline that definitely could have been tightened and fleshed out more in the scriptwriting process, but I also think it works for the messy, ridiculously petty interpersonal politics crafted between Karsh and his social circle. It’s also not as if the film is afraid of switching tones.

Cronenberg has said that humor was very important to him in this movie; after all, life is not all doom and gloom, so why shouldn’t art also include moments of levity, even if it’s so engaged with themes of death and longing? There’s an early scene where Karsh takes a date to the cemetery (already a funny choice), the whole time explaining how GraveTech allows people to see their loved ones via screens on the headstones—only for us to soon realize the photos are of the deceased in their graves, decomposing in real time. Small twisted moments like this, or the dreams Karsh keeps having of his dead wife, place this film closer to the realm of David Lynch than his past work like Scanners (1981) or The Fly (1986). But despite these gestures toward the absurd, it’s clear this is a very personal project for Cronenberg. The dialogues verge on being something akin to Dostoyevsky, openly debating philosophical questions around mortality, fate and, of course, technology. Science fiction has a long history of casting technology in an almost alien light; but in Cronenberg’s movies, technology is an extension of humanity, revealing our priorities and, in this case, our shortsighted, self-interested worldview. The shrouds allow Karsh and his fellow mourners to see their loved ones, but the decomposed states they see them in are, thanks to the acting and camera angles, presented as a kind of violation of the natural. It’s here that we come to understand the refusal to let go as a type of selfishness, one that isn’t necessarily cured by the end. There is no end to grief, we just learn to live with it. This even affects the formal aspects of the film.

The score is very reminiscent of Mulholland Drive (2001), using airy synths to cast a dark tone and establish a meditative pace that’s maintained throughout. This pacing is even present in the camera movements. It’s almost as if cinematographer Douglas Koch was able to imbue the film with a kind of rigor mortis, keeping things very still and stiff except when absolutely necessary. The tempered color palette also reflects this depressed sensibility, really leaning into the morose nature of the subject matter while also contrasting nicely with the many funny scenes that decorate the script. The end result is a very clearly-envisioned project that sometimes becomes stretched beyond the boundaries of its scope, but I think that ultimately reflects the modern condition. In a digital era, where everything is mediated by screens and we can’t even trust what we see with our own eyes anymore, it’s as if the world itself is jam-packed with so many people and things, yet we continue to feel more alone than ever before. The Shrouds is far from a perfect movie, but it's ultimately a very important text about our far from perfect times. We’re lucky to live in a time where someone as singular as David Cronenberg can still make movies, and I think that everyone should support films that lean more into the mystery of life than easily-consumable plots that don’t make you think. Catch this on the big screen while you can!