December 08 2025, 22:07
The Shrouds
Director: David Cronenberg
Release year: 2024
Karsh Relikh part-owns GraveTech, a company that wraps up dead bodies in a material that allows the living to view it in its grave. His wife, Becca, died of cancer, but five years on, through the technology, he notices mysterious growths on her decomposing body. Soon after, the graveyard is seriously damaged, the technology of the graves hacked, and Karsh’s business hangs in the balance.
David Cronenberg wrote this film after the death of his wife, Carolyn, in 2017, but has said there is no catharsis for him in his art. In grief, we suffer, but in The Shrouds there is also plenty of life, humour and sex. Karsh wants to keep his wife’s memory alive by observing her body in the ground as it decomposes. At one point, he tries on one of the shrouds to see what it might feel like for her, and we see him, alone, wrapped in material, looking (and feeling) ridiculous. It’s a fatally flawed enterprise.
To investigate the destruction at the cemetery, Karsh asks his brother-in-law, professional hacker Maury, for help. Maury is paranoid and the ex-husband of Becca’s sister, Terry, who is sexually aroused by conspiracy theories. Karsh is pulled into the strange inner workings of Maury and Terry’s broken marriage, and they send him on a rollercoaster ride of theories involving the Chinese government, Russian spies, Hungarian businessmen, and Icelandic eco-terrorists.
In his dreams, Karsh continues to see Becca in their bedroom, slowly deteriorating from her treatments, but still hungry for love and to be sexually desired. The awkward, absurd, terrible realities of watching someone you love die is captured in the deep oddness of how the people in this film interact. The dialogue feels unnatural and the performances are slightly stilted— the characters often say outrageous things to each other and barely bat an eyelid. Karsh often falls asleep, and in a way the whole film is like a dream, completely unlike real life, and at the same time expressing something true.
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