The Shrouds

The latest unsettling sci-fi thriller from David Cronenberg is a provocative meditation on death and technology that combines the maestro’s signature body horror with profound elder-statesman reflection. In an eerie, deceptively placid near-future, a techno-entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While Karsh is still reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger) from cancer—and falling into a peculiar sexual relationship with his wife’s sister (also Kruger)—a spate of vandalized graves utilizing his “shroud” technology begins to put his enterprise at risk, leading him to uncover a potentially vast conspiracy.

Written following the death of the director’s wife, the new film from David Cronenberg is both a profoundly personal reckoning with grief and a descent into noir-tinged dystopia, set in an ominous world of self-driving cars, data theft, and A.I. personal assistants. Offering Cronenberg’s customary balance of malevolence and wit, THE SHROUDS is a sly and thought-provoking consideration of the corporeal and the digital, the mortal and the infinite, also starring Guy Pearce and Sandrine Holt.