By Jason Osiason

The Shrouds finds Cronenberg circling back to the themes that have always defined him, but the weight feels heavier now. At the center is Karsh, played by Vincent Cassel, a man shattered after the death of his wife, portrayed with haunting presence by Diane Kruger. In his grief he creates a new technology, a burial shroud with cameras that allows people to literally watch their loved ones decompose underground. He even builds a digital version of his wife, a ghost of code that he can still talk to, convinced he is keeping her alive even as he is trapped in his own loss.

The story spirals as Karsh faces outside forces that test his fragile state. Guy Pearce arrives as a rival figure who feeds his paranoia and keeps pulling him deeper into obsession. Cronenberg doesn’t frame any of this as a warning about machines taking over but as something more intimate and unsettling, about how technology and grief intertwine, and how the need to hold on can turn into something corrosive.

Cassel is extraordinary here, channeling Cronenberg’s own voice and presence, even down to his look, embodying a man who is both brilliant and broken. Kruger gives the film its ghostly pulse, both in memory and in simulation, while Pearce slips in with menace that sharpens the paranoia. The performances root the film in humanity even as the story drifts into surreal, clinical detachment.

It does not always hold steady. The pacing drags, the dialogue circles too many times, and the second half piles on ideas that scatter rather than cohere. But even in those missteps, the film carries a raw emotional charge. Cronenberg feels present in every frame, not dissecting death from afar but grappling with it himself after the loss of his own wife.

The Shrouds may not reach the visceral heights of his classics, but it lingers differently. It is mournful, strange, sometimes frustrating, and deeply personal. A film that feels less like mastery and more like an artist searching through his own obsessions to see what remains. [B-]