{The Overlook Film Festival 2025} The Shrouds

“A ghost story without ghosts, and a horror film more obsessed with grief than gore—The Shrouds is Cronenberg at his most intimate and unsettling.”

David Cronenberg has always been fascinated by the body—its vulnerabilities, its grotesqueries, and its ultimate decay. With The Shrouds, he takes that lifelong obsession and channels it into something smaller, quieter, and more intimate. The Shrouds is a deeply personal film, and you can feel it from the first haunted moment. While it may be less outwardly shocking than his most (in)famous works, The Shrouds is no less disturbing—just in a different key.

There’s still plenty of body horror here, but it’s not the oozing, explosive kind of The Fly or Videodrome. Instead, it’s subtler, sadder—rooted in grief, in memory, in the agonizing transition of the body from an object of desire to an object of revulsion. That transformation—how death dehumanizes even the most beloved—sits at the core of the film. What happens to our love when the person we loved becomes a corpse? When their physical presence, once so intoxicating, becomes unbearable?

As with much of Cronenberg’s work, sex and death are inextricably linked. The film contains a fair amount nudity with almost clinical sex—much of it between older men and younger women. It’s hard not to notice (and harder still to ignore) the recurring age gap, which seems to hover somewhere between thematic intent and discomforting fantasy. Whether it’s meant to emphasize the anxieties of aging or something murkier is left frustratingly ambiguous. Like a lot of sex and nudity in Cronenberg’s film its never titalating but rather indicative of the often fumbling, akward, imperfect bodies that lovers rediscover as we age. To Cronenberg that is love. I have been married for twenty years and honestly that feels more authentic than any cheesy romance movie could ever hope to capture.

Narratively, The Shrouds is not perfect. It moves very slowly, and a subplot involving a vaguely defined mystery around Chinese surveilence and corporate espionage loses steam quickly—especially when stacked against the richer emotional terrain of the main character’s grief. That said, it’s a beautifully crafted film, visually striking and thematically cohesive. Cronenberg, even in his most meditative mode, remains a master of cinematic tone.

The central conceit—the invention of a technology that allows people to watch their loved ones decompose in real time—is both macabre and strangely touching. It captures the obsessive desire to remain connected to the physical body, to resist finality even as rot sets in. But while this tech is pivotal to the story, it never quite works as a practical idea. The film seems to understand that—it works better as metaphor than sci-fi. Within the frames of privacy, obsession, and loss, the invention feels emotionally plausible, even if it crumbles under commercial scrutiny.

The Shrouds is also inextricable from Cronenberg’s own personal context. He lost his wife, Carolyn, in 2017, and this film feels like a direct response to that absence. The main character, played with quiet, pained intensity by Vincent Cassel, feels like a surrogate for Cronenberg himself (its hard not to see the visible simmilarities)—a man swallowed by grief, intellectually prodding at mortality in an attempt to stave off emotional collapse. There’s a tenderness to the performance and the direction that suggests this isn’t just a film about death, but a film made with death in the room.

Visually, the film is stunning. Stark compositions, icy lighting, and sterile environments enhance the sense of emotional detachment and spiritual paralysis. It’s Cronenberg’s most melancholic film since Spider, and maybe his most introspective ever. There’s no grand narrative arc here, no real catharsis—just an aching, slow-motion unraveling of a man and a mind undone by absence.

Ultimately, The Shrouds is less interested in resolution than rumination. It’s a ghost story without ghosts, a tech thriller without any of the tech tropes, and a horror film more concerned with the soul than the scare. But what it offers instead is something much rarer: a raw, deeply personal confrontation with mortality from one of cinema’s most legendary provocateurs. It’s imperfect, yes. But it’s also brave.

I caught The Shrouds as part of The Overlook Film Festival. Check out all of our coverage.