“The Shrouds” is the most recent film by director David Cronenberg, known for his contributions to the body horror genre. This film is a drama about a man obsessed with death. He creates a shroud that allows people grieving to view their loved one as they decompose.
The film is a co-production between Canada and France that began screening in film festivals in May 2024 before making its way to the 2025 Milwaukee Film Festival lineup and opening nationwide on April 25, 2025.
In May, Milwaukee Film celebrated the work of Cronenberg by retrospectively screening several of his films, including this one.
“The Shrouds” is a disappointing entry in the director’s filmography. It is a vapid and frustrating film that squanders what could have been an intriguing original premise.
After a visually striking opening scene that grabbed my attention, the rest of the film was a dull exploration of grief. Cronenberg attempted to add something new to horror’s overused grief theme, but failed with its intentions.
I laughed at “The Shrouds” rather than with it. The awkward dialogue and acting seemed intentional, which confused me because the emotions of the film were left inaccessible.
At times, characters meandered through bloated conversations that went on far too long. The dialogue was cringey and felt robotic, which left me unengaged in the story.
There are extended sequences of the main character driving a Tesla vehicle that seemed like product placement. These scenes were annoying and once again immediately brought me out of the film’s world.
A quarter of this film was spent watching a screen from the POV of a character. The directing and cinematography were uninspired, and the audience was forced to watch a cell phone screen, a laptop screen or the screen inside of the Tesla vehicle as characters converse with one another.
Cronenberg mentioned in this film’s press tour that “The Shrouds” originated as a miniseries on Netflix. However, the streaming giant cancelled the project, and the director was forced to rework it into a movie.
Most of “The Shrouds” felt like a never-ending play, instead of an engaging cinematic experience. The one positive result of this film is that no audience member has to be subjected to anything longer than two hours of torture.
The acting from Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce and Sandrine Holt is stiff, with no personality given to their characters.
The worst offender is Cassel, who portrays the protagonist. A character that was inspired by Cronenberg himself. For a film that is supposed to be a personal address to grief, I found it entirely cold and soulless, with no character or story to get invested in.
Kruger gave the best overall performance and had the most interesting choices in her dual role of playing sisters. However, anything she accomplishes in the film with her characters is bogged down by Cronenberg completely stripping the female characters of any agency. Female characters in this film exist to serve the development of the main male character.
One of Kruger’s characters develops romantic interest in the male protagonist out of nowhere. Up to this point, the character had rejected his advancements and had a developing personality. However, she forgoes this personality and starts only behaving in a way that serves the development of the male protagonist. For the rest of the film, this relationship advances as a sexual fantasy rather than anything deeper.
Cronenberg’s questionable treatment of common tropes does not end there. The worst example of this is Holt’s character, who is also blind. The handling of the character being blind feels just as outdated and out of touch.
In a specific moment in the film, the character does the typical blind character cliche where she feels the male protagonist’s face. At this point, creators need to be doing a better job of representing characters with a disability and giving them development instead of only defining them with their disability.
Pearce’s character is central to a secondary theme of the film; conspiracy. Somehow, his character is the most forgettable. The potentially insightful exploration of paranoia and conspiracy as it relates to grief is not explored enough in this film to leave an impact.
Pearce is supposed to be playing a tech genius, but Cronenberg is so unfamiliar with technology that most of the tech in this film is entirely incomprehensible.
The choices made in “The Shrouds” were intentionally made which makes the film even more mind-boggling to me.
In that way, it might represent personal grief, because everyone experiences grief in different ways. Often, when someone grieves differently than we do, we look upon them strangely as I did with this film.