David Cronenberg’s ‘The Shrouds’ is the film for our post-truth digital age

The opening shot of David Cronenberg’s latest film, The Shrouds, is of a withering body in an underground cavern. The camera pans and settles on a man peering through a gap in the earth above, before he widens his mouth and the camera zooms into his scream. It’s an image that sums up the unsettling strangeness of grief in this film, where mourning is as bizarre and unmooring as the unwieldy digital sphere.

With echoes of the Canadian director’s classic erotic drama Crash and more recent dystopian Crimes of the Future, The Shrouds descends not only into burial grounds but the murky world of online conspiracies. Karsh (Vincent Cassel) is a self-absorbed entrepreneur still reeling after the death of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). He has lavished money on his invention, ‘the shroud’ – named after the Shroud of Turin, of which Karsh is sceptical – an innovative mantle whose radiation allows the decomposition of the departed to be tracked in real time, honouring his Jewish wife’s belief that body and soul are intertwined. An entire, exclusive cemetery, ‘GraveTech’, complete with restaurant and bar (sombrely decorated with the high-tech, grim-reaper-like cloaks), is scattered with coveted burial plots for this purpose.

But Karsh soon learns the unruliness of the tech domain. When GraveTech is vandalised – recalling real-life, antisemitic defacements of Jewish cemeteries – and hacked, Karsh is ensnared in the shady realm of the dark web. A client lets him in on a possible plot by Russians – or an Icelandic eco-activist group, or the dodgy doctor who treated Becca’s cancer, or GraveTech’s Chinese investors – to hijack the burial grounds as a communications network. GraveTech’s decaying bodies start to become patterned with mysterious, tumorous lumps, suggesting after-effects of the shroud’s radiation or the manipulation of the shroud’s digital images by menacing outside forces. And Karsh’s AI assistant – designed to look like his deceased wife – goes rogue. Meanwhile, in the romance Karsh starts up with Becca’s doppelganger-like sister (also Kruger), conspiracy theories take an erotic turn.

Given Cronenberg’s own recent experience of grief after the death of his wife from cancer, Cassel’s salt and pepper hair and Cronenberg reportedly training the actor to speak with his Toronto accent, it’s hard not to see The Shrouds as a mocking self-portrait of a man doubly clueless about the internet and how to grieve. Unlike other recent films about grief (Bring Her Back, Smile, Hereditary), The Shrouds is less in the language of horror – striking a newly pensive, otherworldly and odd tone, a step apart even from Cronenberg’s own output.

A techno conspiracy thriller that equates the bewildering post-truth internet world with the senselessness of death, The Shrouds is a deliberately illegible film. It does, however, continue Cronenberg’s career-long concern of what happens to intimacy when enmeshed with racing technology. Tech in its different, dubious and uncontrollable forms provides a high-voltage pulse throughout this meditation on sorrow, but otherwise, for a thriller, the stakes are strangely low. Karsh’s dentist, whose aphorism is ‘grief is rotting your teeth’, and the shrouds themselves offer a reminder that the body is always in a state of steady decay. The key players are either waiting for death or already in the ground. Ultimately, GraveTech, despite its promise of bringing us closer to our loved ones, epitomises a futile desire for intimacy that can never be fulfilled.

The Shrouds is released in the UK on 4 July 2025, whatson.bfi.org.uk