The Shrouds looks like the filmic equivalent of David Bowie’s final album, Dark Star, a requiem revisiting old ideas in an up-to-the-minute way. David Cronenberg has not announced that he is dying. But aren’t we all? All the time? It’s the sort of thing Cronenberg has been saying, with a macabre chuckle, since he first announced himself with Shivers 50 years ago.
Cronenberg’s own wife died in 2017 and it would be crass to suggest that The Shrouds is really all about that. But let’s be crass for a minute and point out that Vincent Cassel, who plays this film’s dubious hero, has hair like Cronenberg’s. His character dresses like him and works in “industrial video production” (a joke, surely). And, as the curtain goes up, his screen wife is in the throes of exiting this world.
The comparisons presumably cease at this point, because Cronenberg surely doesn’t have his wife buried in a hi-tech grave and is watching her decompose via surveillance technology buried in the coffin with the dear departed.
But that’s what Relikh (as Cronenberg has jokily named this man left behind by a departure) is doing, using ShroudCam, a technology developed by his own company, Gravetech, which is in the process of rolling out the system to rich people the world over. In classic tech-bro style, Relikh has turned a crisis, his own, into an opportunity.
All this is thrown into doubt when the cemetery where Becca Relikh now quietly moulders is vandalised, the hi-tech graves are hacked and the live feeds encrypted with malware that cannot be hacked.
While Relikh waits to discover whether this is terrorism or superhighway robbery, he turns to two people – the former husband of his wife’s twin sister, a tech whizz, and the twin sister herself. And at around this time we also meet a potential customer, dying Hungarian tech bro Karoly Szabo (Vieslav Krystyan) and his blind, minxy wife Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), who is trying to arrange for her soon-to-be-ex husband to be buried in a Gravetech grave in Budapest. Think Bond villain, her not him.
So, death, doubles, the interface of the organic and the technological. Cronenberg self-consciously returns to ideas he’s been all over in films like Twins, Videodrome and eXistenZ, often in scenes that are talkier than you’d expect from a show-don’t-tell director like Cronenberg.
It’s a good movie for ideas rather than drama. And for performances, some straightforward, others more discordant. Guy Pearce, as the techy ex-brother-in-law (ex seems to mark the spot in this movie) again shows how good he is, here as an obsessive paranoid hacker so morally weak that he is also a candidate for bad guy. Diane Kruger, who plays the dead wife, the living twin sister and the voice of Relikh’s AI assistant, is probably as good if not better than she’s ever been, and the film’s best scene (I won’t ruin it) is the film’s best scene because of her.
Is the acting all a bit stilted though, particularly Cassel’s? It is, though it feels deliberate. Cassel is working in English and his native language is French, but he speaks English better than this. Relikh is a man out of touch with everything organic – people, normality, everyday emotions and, perhaps, speech – and interacts with simulacra (dreams, screens, twin sisters) the entire time if he possibly can. It comes as no surprise when it’s suggested Relikh is going to sleep with Becca’s sister Terry, though you do have to wonder how a man thise closed-down is going to do it.
Cronenberg’s dark humour acts like a studding of black truffles – the shadowy Chinese tech corp called Shining Cloth, the AI assistant’s name being Hunny, regular reminders of mortality as the semi-dismembered Becca visits Relikh in night-time visions. And Cronenberg has piled up his characters and plotlines like a conspiracy theorist might. It’s tangled and confusing and maybe it doesn’t all connect up. And that’s the way he seems to like it.
The Shrouds – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
