David Cronenberg returns to body horror with 'The Shrouds'

Cronenberg explores grief, decay, and surveillance tech in his latest surreal vision.

A scene from "The Shrouds." (c) Janus Films

By Anna Fadiah and Hayu Andini

David Cronenberg returns to body horror with The Shrouds, a visually arresting and narratively eerie film that resurrects the filmmaker’s most enduring fascinations: transformation, mutilation, and the thin veil between human flesh and advancing technology. In this twisted new entry to his five-decade-long body of work, Cronenberg delivers a slow-burning meditation on loss, digital obsession, and decomposition—both emotional and physical.

The term “body horror,” often synonymous with Cronenberg himself, has always embodied more than just shock or gore. Here, in The Shrouds, it manifests through a morbidly imaginative setup: a grieving widower named Karsh, portrayed by Vincent Cassel, who has invented a way to livestream the decomposition of dead bodies. Yes, mourners in this near-future Toronto can literally watch their loved ones rot in high-definition, thanks to smart shrouds equipped with cameras. It’s grotesque, deeply Cronenbergian, and somehow also an oddly moving commentary on how we process death in the digital age.

The film starts with a lighter, almost satirical tone. Karsh, clearly modeled on Cronenberg himself, owns a trendy restaurant built within a cemetery—a place where haute cuisine meets tombstones and decay is part of the ambiance. His blind date—at the very restaurant, no less—sets the film's tone: a mix of dark humor, melancholy, and the chilling intimacy of technological intrusion. This is Cronenberg at his wittiest, but make no mistake—this is also Cronenberg at his most haunting.

Karsh, grief, and the digital afterlife

In The Shrouds, Karsh is not merely mourning his wife, Becca, who succumbed to cancer. He is consumed by her. Through GraveTech, his startup, he is attempting to erase the natural boundary between life and death. He speaks to dentists about her X-rays, watches footage of her body's decay, and converses with a digital assistant named Hunny—voiced by Becca’s actress, Diane Kruger. Hunny may or may not be spying on him, possibly for the Chinese government. The paranoia is ever-present, and Karsh is entangled in it all while still dwelling in the lingering trauma of Becca’s final moments, where she lost limbs and agency to her illness.

Cassel’s performance is restrained but effective, portraying Karsh as a man teetering on the edge of madness without ever falling in. He’s not overtly theatrical; he’s quietly unraveling. Kruger, who also plays Becca’s sister Terry, balances emotional nuance with an unnerving physicality—especially when she embodies Becca in flashbacks that depict a digitally disfigured body, a stunning example of Cronenberg's updated visual toolbox.

A high-tech cemetery and its secrets

But David Cronenberg doesn’t stop at emotional grief or bodily degradation. The Shrouds ventures into a full-blown mystery when the cemetery is vandalized. It’s not just a case of grave robbing—this is technological sabotage. Data has been stolen from the smart shrouds. Karsh, along with Terry and her ex-husband Maury (played by Guy Pearce), begins an investigation that becomes more surreal with every lead, from radical political groups to connections in Reykjavik.

The whodunit structure initially serves the story well. The plot thickens. There are theories about international cyber-espionage, musings on capitalist fetishism of death, and philosophical reflections on memory and loss. The real thrill, however, lies not in solving the mystery, but in watching how far Cronenberg is willing to push the central metaphor of digital mourning and bodily disintegration.

Tech paranoia meets philosophical decay

Just like Crimes of the Future, his 2022 return to cinema, The Shrouds is more interested in mood and provocation than tight plotting. The second half of the film becomes a dreamlike wandering through grief, memory, and what could almost be described as digital necrophilia. Karsh’s obsession with watching his wife rot becomes a surreal act of devotion—and pathology.

Cronenberg asks questions that are at once deeply philosophical and disturbingly literal: What happens when we don’t let go of the dead? What does it mean to digitize grief? And in our desperate need to preserve, to archive, to revisit—what parts of ourselves do we lose?

The unsettling answer, in Cronenberg’s view, seems to be everything. We lose clarity, stability, perhaps even sanity. And yet, he also suggests that in this act of obsessive witnessing, there is something deeply human, something ancient, something ritualistic.

When the body speaks louder than the plot

David Cronenberg returns to body horror with renewed vigor here, using it not for shock but for intimate psychological exploration. There’s a moment when Karsh recalls breaking his wife’s hip while she lay frail in bed—a moment rendered in flashback so stark and honest, it momentarily overwhelms the film’s more stylized elements. This is not horror for thrills. It’s horror as memory. Horror as guilt.

Visually, the film is muted and clinical, much like the tech environments it portrays. Cold lighting, sterile camera movements, and hauntingly symmetrical compositions dominate the aesthetic. The sense of control is overpowering—and entirely intentional. Because as the narrative descends into ambiguity, what remains concrete is the physical: bones, flesh, surgical scars, and the inexorable progression of decomposition.

A slow unraveling

As the film progresses, its energy slackens. The mystery gives way to metaphysical wanderings. Cronenberg begins to echo himself, revisiting familiar tropes about blurred realities and split identities. What started as a razor-sharp, cynical satire gradually becomes more abstract, less concerned with plot and more with atmosphere.

This will frustrate some viewers. By the time The Shrouds ends, many questions are left unanswered. Was Hunny spying on Karsh? Who really vandalized the cemetery? Did Becca’s doctor vanish to Iceland for a reason—or was that a red herring? Cronenberg, true to form, is not interested in clean resolutions. But one can't help but feel that the narrative deserved a little more connective tissue before it dissolved completely into reverie.

Still, what lingers most are the performances—especially Kruger’s, both intimate and confrontational—and the film’s disquieting commitment to its premise. Watching your loved ones decay in 4K is an idea that should not work. And yet, in The Shrouds, it becomes the emotional centerpiece of a film that, for all its flaws, dares to probe our most sacred fears about death and memory.

Cronenberg’s enduring legacy

David Cronenberg returns to body horror not just to rehash old ideas but to update them for a new era of digital intimacy and technological voyeurism. The Shrouds may not be his most cohesive film, but it is undeniably Cronenberg: bold, uncompromising, and soaked in the queasy fascination of what it means to have a body—and to lose it.

In an age of sterile science fiction and CGI spectacle, Cronenberg’s vision stands apart. He doesn’t want to impress you. He wants to disturb you. And disturb he does—with a scalpel’s precision.