by Adelaide Song on 2025-07-06.
Tags: film drama
Spoilers follow. (I guess.)
I chose to watch The Shrouds on a whim today, largely because I was shocked it was even coming out in Australian theaters to begin with. The choice was between that and 28 Years Later: I’m not sure I picked the right option, but I’m certain I chose the more challenging one to write about.
Normally I like to do a brief synopsis as part of these reviews. I’m not going to bother doing one for The Shrouds. Part of it is that I feel like this would give the plot undue weight. Part of it is that the plot is so often so stupid that if you find yourself caring at all about it, you will completely derail your viewing experience going “…but why?” ad nauseam. At times, it feels like this movie was scripted by the ghost of Tom Clancy at his very most red and yellow-scared.
Here’s what you need to know: startup founder Karsh (Vincent Cassel) runs GraveTech, a business where families of the dead can view the bodies decomposing in real time via the titular shrouds. In the film’s only concession to reality, he explicitly does none of the technical work, and has yet to secure a major client, despite driving a Tesla, having a custom-built digital assistant and owning a restaurant run out of his model graveyard. When a mysterious break-in happens at the aforementioned graveyard, things start getting weird.
Again, the exact specifics of what happens next don’t really matter, and they will likely just make you mad. I have no clue if Cronenberg even knows Metal Gear exists but the women in this film feel distinctly Kojima, no compliment intended. Depending on your personal tolerance level for strange performance, Cassel’s acting can come off as convincingly dissociated or just comical, often both in the span of a single scene.
You were probably expecting a “but” by now, so here it is. Even after opening this review with 200-odd words of pure caveat, it’s clear that Cronenberg can still probe the holes in modern existence with medical precision.
It has never been easier to hold onto what we’ve lost, or a fragment of it, anyway. This has obviously been the trend for all of human history—it’s not hard to imagine Neolithic superstitions about cave paintings stealing people’s souls—but the line has gone asymptotic as we sink into the age of simulacrum. Entire memeplexes of conservative thought are built around hallucinated JPEGs of white families and picket fences. People are asking any number of character AIs to wear their loved ones as faces. We are no longer satisfied with records of the past as they existed, and demand the ability to stitch together new pieces of history on-demand. In this environment, it is entirely understandable why someone like Karsh would grieve the way he does, and Cronenberg steps us through it in painful detail.
Karsh is surrounded by images of his dead wife, Becca: first, her decaying body, which he watches obsessively via his company’s shrouds; second, Hunny, a custom virtual assistant built to resemble Becca; finally, her twin sister, Terry. Every animate incarnation of Becca is, naturally, played by Diane Kruger. Each one fails him over the course of the film.
The cemetery’s sabotage proves Karsh can’t even secure the most important body in his possession, and denies him access to Becca’s live-feed for the rest of the movie. It’s implied that Hunny is under someone’s direct control rather than being an independent AI, which is confirmed when she appears to Karsh as a nude, dismembered Bitmoji parody of Becca’s final days. Despite the inherently comical stylisation, watching the mutilated model dance and masturbate while taunting Karsh is profoundly stomach-churning. As for Terry, even Becca’s literal identical twin fails to be a carbon copy of the original; it’s a really crude observation, but Terry bragging about her breasts being larger somehow feels as genuine as it is embarrassing.
Intuitively, we expect Karsh to love the genuine article more than he does the pale imitations. Yet we see him turn down every chance he gets to interact with the closest remnant of Becca he has left: the actual corpse. When the break-in happens, he refuses to even visit the wreckage himself until he’s accompanied by his ex-CTO, the neurotic Maury (Guy Pearce, once again proving nobody does sexual neurosis like him.) Despite appearances, the corpses weren’t the target of the robbery—just the video feeds from their shrouds. As such, when Karsh notices odd growths in the last images he has of Becca’s skeleton, checking whether or not they exist should be as simple as just digging her up. But he can’t even bring himself to do that indirectly, claiming that there’s too much red tape associated with it. Just in case it’s not obvious, the film confirms that it’s pure deflection: Becca needs to be re-interred as part of the rebuilding process, during which security chief Gray asks if he’d like to inspect her body while she’s above ground. Naturally he refuses. “Not while they’re working on her.”
This line alone reveals so much about Karsh’s psyche. Over the course of the film, it becomes gradually apparent what his problem is, and it’s not any genuine belief in the sanctity of the body—he refers to himself as a “non-observant atheist”, among other things. The real issue starts surfacing the moment Becca’s oncologist Eckler (Steve Switzman) is introduced into the story. Eckler was Becca’s ex from college, a relationship that started while Becca was a freshman and he was teaching. Despite that hideous conflict of interest, he was assigned to be her lead practitioner, and as her condition worsened, they started spending more and more time together. In one of Karsh’s dreams of her, Becca talks almost worshipfully of Eckler’s treatment, telling Karsh proudly that Eckler has her amputated breast and arm in his possession. They’ll be used in a presentation on his research, her flesh on display for an audience of strangers. (In a previous flashback, Karsh says the breast taken was his favourite one, another admission that feels like a genuine leakage of the id.) Finally, after Karsh interrogates her, Terry admits to seeing Eckler take Becca out on multiple occasions, having dismissed it initially as an attempt at atonement. The maimed parody of Becca taunts Karsh with the idea of them sleeping together. Karsh bemoans verbatim that Eckler “had her body first.” No subtext here, just supertext.
I’ve complained about the film’s off-putting depiction of women, but its misogyny is clearly established with intent. Becca isn’t the only character with mirrors in the film; Karsh has his own double in the form of Maury. Maury is Terry’s ex-husband, and like Karsh, he grieves Terry’s loss to the point of obsession. He calls himself and Karsh “brothers in loss” and compares his separation to death on multiple occasions. When he’s revealed as the source of the break-in and the two come to blows, it’s easy to side with Karsh over him. (Not just because the costuming team gave Maury one of the worst haircuts I’ve ever seen outside the mirror.) We’re told that he’s a paranoid schizophrenic, and his fears of Terry sleeping with Karsh are genuinely unfounded (at the start of the film, anyway.) He starts the movie repeatedly harrassing Terry to no response, and his behaviour only becomes more erratic and dangerous. In his final appearance, he claims to have been tortured by the Chinese government, who believe him to be part of a Russian operation to infiltrate Karsh’s company. To prove himself, he holds up the bloody stumps of two severed fingers on one hand—something Terry claims is nothing more than one of his party tricks, an injury he actually sustained in high school shop class.
Sure, write off Maury as a lunatic crank, obsessed with a woman who doesn’t care about him. But I don’t think Maury is a foil to Karsh so much as he is a parallel. The two share their paranoia and cuck complex, and both of them grieve by impotently exerting control over what they’ve lost. Maury’s approach just doesn’t have the sci-fi glamor of Karsh, who turns his wife into 8K video-on-demand, commissions a servant with her likeness, and pursues her sister against her dying wishes, all for largely meaningless sex.
Karsh starts the movie by telling a prospective date that he intends to be buried in a plot right beside his wife, where the two of them will remain together in eternity. At the end of the film, it’s revealed that someone has buried Eckler’s corpse in his plot. If Karsh was sincere about his promise to his wife, he would disinter Eckler without a moment’s hesitation. Instead he once again hands it off on the usual excuse of bureaucracy—albeit a little more understandable, given Eckler has been shot in the head—and flies off to GraveTech’s newest installation in Budapest alongside his new girlfriend. In the film’s concluding shot, Karsh accuses Becca’s ghost of being the one to bury Eckler there, and more or less browbeats her into joining him in Budapest.
In this light, every strange decision he makes ends up making perfect sense. What he’s grieving isn’t her death, but rather his loss, and his endless arrays of deflections and demuring comes from the split between the two. No wonder he can’t heal; he can’t even be honest about what hurts him. Of course the world of the movie is a morass of uncertainty. Were Maury’s fingers missing the whole time? Did Eckler experiment on Becca? Is the Chinese government spying on Karsh? What’s real? What isn’t? Karsh has had every opportunity to answer these questions for himself, but to do so would spoil his perfect self-image, thus he chooses not to. “How dark are you willing to go?” Karsh asks the audience, but by the end of the film, it’s clear we’re not the ones who need to answer that question. All we can do is watch him turn away towards the light.