NZIFF 2025 Craccum Coverage | The Shrouds

Review by Miyuni Dinara Karnasuriya.

“How dark are you willing to go?” Cronenberg answers his filmic counterpart’s question with futuristic graveyards that livestream decomposing remains, an AI temptress, doppelganger sex, and a transgressive exploration of grief. 

David Cronenberg’s “body horror” sci-fi was inspired by the director’s own loss of his wife to cancer. Like the film’s Karsh (styled in his image), he also felt a “visceral urge” to lie beside his late wife in her casket. The autobiographical elements end there (hopefully). Karsh copes by inventing a novel technology to watch a loved one’s corpse rot in real time. Until one-night multiple graves (including his wife Becca’s) are desecrated, leaving him to puzzle over the perpetrators.

Watching this film was both deeply funny and unnerving. In the theatre, the crack of a hip bone during sex and conspiratorial arousal elicited both laughs and groans. Further still, unlike typical Hollywood ‘sick girls’ for whom a paler shade of foundation and a bald cap suffices, Cronenberg confronts the viewer with Becca’s brittle, emaciated, and mutilated cancer-wracked frame. Yet, Karsh and Cronenberg view her body with unsullied attraction even as the sickness consumes her. Their desire to recover it is as possessive as it is natural. 

Cronenberg refuses to tie up the many loose ends in “satisfying” bows. Instead, we are left to wonder if we could ever be freed from grief, ever be freed from love, or ever be freed from our own fragile flesh. Death remains, in art as in life, the ultimate resolution.