The Shrouds (2025)

David Cronenberg returns to our screens once more, this time through gravestones, and the mind of Vincent Cassel's Karsh. Karsh is an entrepreneur who has founded a restaurant with a graveyard attached- a state of the art burial site in which clients can watch their deceased loved ones as they decay in real time, through screens on their graves and apps on their phones.

It certainly sounds like the work of Cronenberg, and The Shrouds invokes much of his previous work especially his 1996 adaptation of J.G Ballard's Crash, as well as feeling similar in artistic nature to Crimes of the Future (2022)- not to mention his early body horror work. Interestingly, it's his 1983 Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone that also comes into play here, with Christopher Walken's psychic powers of seeing potential futures reminiscent of Karsh's odd obsession with seeing the future of someone who has died, albeit from a live feed of their decomposing body.

Karsh has struggled to find peace after the death of his wife Becca (a superb dual performance by Diane Kruger who also plays Becca's sister Terri) and attempts to find some sort of resolution to his inner turmoil through 8K live footage of Becca's rotting corpse. When there's a break in at the graveyard, and graves and equipment are vandalized, he suspects a whole number of people and groups who might have motive.

Rather than involving the police and creating a media frenzy, Karsh enlists the help of his ex-brother in law, IT engineer Maury (a reliably terrific guy Pearce) who gets to work addressing the company's (GraveTech) servers to see who might be responsible. Both Maury and his ex wife offer all sorts of insane conspiracies as to who or what might be behind the attacks on GraveTech, and move the film into the realms of paranoia; but really what The Shrouds is tackling is grief, in its many forms.

Despite the fact Cronenberg claims that the death of his own wife in 2017 didn't have any influence on his ideas behind the film, inevitably, his grief comes to the fore during The Shrouds. What makes the film so interesting is the way he confronts it, knowingly or not. The film's plot in intertwining the paranoia of technological surveillance and cyber crime with the crux of GraveTech- which at its core is grief itself- ties all the reasoning of what's going on together rather brilliantly.

The Shrouds is arguably Cronenberg's finest work since A History of Violence (2005). That's not to diminish his films in the period since- Maps to the Stars (2014) is another one I personally really like- but this feels like he's tapping into something very real that happens to us all, and combining it with a dystopian idea that feels eerily plausible- but also remains true to his own body horror back catalogue. It's also frequently blackly comedic, something you perhaps wouldn't have expected; but it's absolutely deliberate, Cronenberg ensures that there's a playful edge to Karsh's character, even in his most desperate moments.

It remains with you long after you've left the cinema, giving you much to mull over, just like Cronenberg's finest work always does. The Shrouds is a deeply personal and layered piece of work, and it's one of 2025's finest films so far without a doubt. 8.2/10