The Shrouds

How lucky we are to have this boundary pusher still thinking up such bold and provocative films.

With The Shrouds, the filmmaker -- not only one of Canada’s greatest creations, but cinema’s, too -- has delivered what might be his career-defining masterpiece.

The Shrouds may sound like a thriller but its sleek, icy allure is in presenting Karsh as a pawn to the rabbit hole of his grief, which plays out across the film in speculative, increasingly intimate conversations and erotic detours.

A Cronenbergian body horror of integrity and force.

Mordantly, head-spinningly convoluted, it’s a unique take on the director’s favorite themes, laced with bleak wit and encased in an icy chill that’s fitting for a tale fixated on the grave.

What started out as something that promised to be akin to a droll, twisted Coen Brothers comedy instead wanders off into reverie... Mr. Cronenberg may not care about closure, but a movie can benefit greatly from it.

Mostly, The Shrouds stars its 81-year-old director, whose pain finds voice in a film that encapsulates, in the most personal way imaginable, his lifetime of marrying the humane and the horrific.

If you told me one of the most moving films I would see in 2025 would be by David Cronenberg, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.But The Shrouds is the director at his most vulnerable, using the tropes of his filmography to explore these hefty concepts

The Shrouds is foremost an exploration of grief. Cronenberg’s latest traces the bodies and shapes grief takes as it adapts to our digital, entangled, schizophrenic world.


Cronenberg delivers the elements we expect from one of his films, but this time they come wrapped up in an emotional tale that will hit home for anyone who’s ever lost somebody they loved.