Life, Death and the Mind of Cronenberg
DIRECTED BY DAVID CRONENBERG/2025
There’s something about David Cronenberg’s films that has always struck me as a paradox. They are icy, clinical, cerebral — and yet, paradoxically, they offer a kind of strange warmth, like the comfort of a familiar, well-worn blanket. Part of that resonance comes from the way Cronenberg dismantles the traditional artifice of filmmaking. He violates the expected rules of screenwriting — excessive exposition, dialogue that plainly articulates ideas — but it never matters, because that surplus is animated by genuine intellectual rigor. His characters are not mere vessels for plot; they are brilliant minds, inhabiting professions researched with a deep, almost obsessive curiosity. Watching them has always made me want to be smarter, more inquisitive, more alive to the mysteries of the world.
The Shrouds feels at once like a retrospective and a culmination. It draws from the genetic material of Cronenberg’s earlier work, but pares it back even further, stripping away anything inessential. Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, an unmistakable proxy for Cronenberg himself: a grieving widower who invents “GraveTech,” a technology that permits the living to observe the decomposition of their loved ones’ bodies through high-tech shrouds and interactive headstones. It’s a staggering conceit, not merely about grief but about the unbearable need to see, to understand, to hold onto the dead even as they vanish.
There’s no mistaking the profound grief from which The Shrouds was born. In that sense, it stands among Cronenberg’s most emotionally resonant works. What he crafts here is not another exhausted ghost story or high fantasy of resurrection — it is a radical new vision of the love story, one rooted in how we dream of the dead, how we use technology to animate the absent. It is cinema as cemetery, and it captures the living in the act of brooding, lamenting, interrogating those who no longer stand beside us.
The narrative unfolds in elliptical, destabilizing ways: when Karsh’s wife’s grave is desecrated, along with others, he is drawn into an investigation that entangles cyber conspiracies, spiritual anxieties, and long philosophical dialogues about mortality and memory. Guy Pearce portrays Maury, the original architect of GraveTech and the ex-husband of Karsh’s new partner, Terry. While suspicions briefly orbit Maury, Cronenberg deliberately withholds narrative closure. The desecrations remain partially unexplained; the deeper mystery becomes not “who did this” but “why do we need to know?”
Cronenberg is not interested in entertainment in the conventional sense — unless intellectual curiosity entertains you. The Shrouds is an excavation of his own bereavement, his looming mortality, and our increasingly desperate attempts to mechanize remembrance. He has little interest in the binary question of whether technology is good or evil. His preoccupation lies in why we summon it into existence at all.
Even when the plot becomes tangled — and it certainly does — the complexity feels truthful. It mirrors the intellectual and emotional knots of a brilliant mind confronting the insoluble. You could accuse The Shrouds of being slow, verbose, or didactic. And perhaps it is. But these criticisms miss the larger truth: Cronenberg is offering something few filmmakers dare anymore — an unvarnished, searching work of personal philosophy.
And perhaps that is the film’s deepest sadness. Watching The Shrouds, you sense Cronenberg confronting the end — and you sense, too, the ending of a kind of cinema that cannot be replicated. Even if his children continue his legacy in their own way, no one will make films quite like this again.
If The Shrouds is Cronenberg’s final work, I am grateful for it. It is not perfect, but it is, in its own stubborn and cerebral way, perfect for him. A cinematic eulogy to death, to curiosity, and to the unquenchable human need to ask questions, even from beyond the grave.
