'The Shrouds': Long preserve the old flesh

by Mitchel Green - May 12, 2025

| mitchelgreen34@gmail.com source: The Movie Database

It may shock you to learn that David Cronenberg has made a new film about technology and its relation to the human body, one that is both intensely erotic and uncomfortable in equal measure. Though Cronenberg isn’t breaking conceptual ground, even for himself, there’s no doubt that “The Shrouds” is just as full of provocative ideas and emotional discomfot as any of his greatest works, even if it doesn’t coalesce dramaturgically.

Rather than reach far into the future to explore his science-fiction themes as he did in his previous film “Crimes of the Future,” Cronenberg is far more focused on the present moment and the technological precipice we stand before. Whether this is to tap into the more personal, immediate context of his wife passing away a few years ago, or him having a more reactionary take on what he sees in the world around him, Cronenberg creates a world that feels uncomfortably closer to our own than what one might expect from a sci-fi film.

The way technology perverts daily human life in this film is chilling in the way it mirrors our own world. Throughout the film, Karsh (Vincent Cassel) interacts with an animated artificial intelligence made to look and sound like his deceased wife (Diane Kruger), both helping in day-to-day tasks and offering some sexual pleasure. This is not too far removed from people who have looked to Chat-GPT and other artificial intelligence platforms for companionship, or even those who have used AI to reconstruct the voices and likenesses of their loved ones for emotional and even legal purposes. Even the peripheral presence of a Tesla car adds to the sense of unease when we live in a world where Elon Musk’s influence pervades our communication, stagnating innovation, and faltering government.

Is our welcoming overreliance on digital technology leaving us unequipped to deal with reality? Will it cause us to go off the edge with paranoia like Maury (Guy Pearce), a schizophrenic who manufactures a convoluted conspiracy to get back at Karsh for sleeping with his ex-wife (or potentially just to have some form of human connection with him based around a common goal)? Is it hindering our ability to go through a natural human grieving process, obsessed with being able to view the rotting corpses of our loved ones because it’s easier to hold onto something tangible than deal with an unclear path forward that may not even lead anywhere? Cronenberg isn’t content to use these questions for a simple cautionary tale against these potentially evil forces, and instead interrogates himself for the way he dove into his art after his wife’s death. He neither lets himself off easy for failing to deal with his grief properly nor condemns himself for it. This is simply how he is. He understands how hard it can be to go through a struggle like that, and doesn’t fault anyone for marching on by any means necessary. Eventually, with the help of others that we open ourselves up to, we move on.

The glut of early Cronenberg body-horror ripoffs and their massive popularity over the last few years is baffling, given that his films have never had a particularly marketable aesthetic. Even the grosser imagery he conjures up could be found in plenty of low-grade horror films from any era. It seems the filmmakers he inspired and the audiences that continue to eat up that surface-level genre trash have missed what makes Cronenberg the greatest science-fiction filmmaker of all time. Grafting his messy real-world ideas on human sexuality, grief, paranoia, and tech dominance onto a genre framework and then pushing those ideas to the forefront instead of focusing solely on sci-fi and horror mayhem makes his films so resonant and startling as works of social commentary.