The Shrouds 2024

Directed by David Cronenberg Nocturnal

David Cronenberg’s sardonic self-portrait of his own struggle with grief is couched within a chilly and unsettling story of a tech-savant and his morbid invention which brings bereavement into the app age.

Aug 02

Bridgeway Cinemas

Aug 04

The Civic

Aug 08

The Academy

Canada In English
119 minutes
R16
Violence, offensive language, sexual material & content that may disturb

Director, Screenplay

Producers

Saïd Ben Saïd, Anthony Vaccarello, Martin Katz

Cinematography

Douglas Koch

Editor

Christopher Donaldson

Production Designer

Carol Spier

Costume Designer

Anne Dixon

Music

Howard Shore

Cast

Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, Sandrine Holt, Elizabeth Saunders

Festivals

Cannes (In Competition), Melbourne, Toronto, New York 2024; Rotterdam 2025

Elsewhere

Body horror maestro David Cronenberg created this funereal film – a capstone to a remarkable career – after the loss of his wife Carolyn to a particularly ravaging fight with cancer. Autobiographical elements have wormed their way into the story; the lead character Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassell), clearly styled to look like Cronenberg, mourns the death of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger), who has been taken by a cancer that routinely required painful amputations. In his terrible grief, the sleek and sophisticated Karsh has founded GraveTech, a bizarre new technological frontier whose products are the titular “shrouds”, which reproduce the body in the grave as a 3D model that mourners can watch decompose remotely via a smartphone app.

The Shrouds is a clinically executed, withering work of self-assessment, interweaving morbid conspiracies with Cronenberg’s trademark affinity for the macabre, the bleakly humorous, and the blithely erotic. Alongside Cassell and Kruger, Guy Pearce shines as Karsh’s twitchy brother-in-law. A telling thread of delicate sadness runs through this examination of loss and longing that withholds nothing. — Tom Augustine