THE SHROUDS Trailer: Vincent Cassel Goes Down a Hole of Mystery and Grief in David Cronenberg’s Latest

After his return a few years ago with Crimes of the Future, body horror maestro David Cronenberg has quickly followed it up with what may be his most personal film yet. The Shrouds is another darkly funny futuristic thriller starring Vincent Cassel as Karsch, a widowed entrepreneur who creates a program called GraveTech to allow for mourners to monitor their late loved ones’ decaying bodies via microscopic cameras hidden in stylistic burial shrouds. Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, and Sandrine Holt also star.

It made a splash on last year’s festival circuit, wowing moviegoers at Cannes, TIFF, and NYFF. Sideshow and Janus Films have now unveiled the official trailer ahead of its release in NY & LA on April 18, before expanding nationwide on April 25.

In my review from NYFF, I said, “Cronenberg fans will marvel at this uniquely styled mixture of sex, death, and (not so) futuristic technology. But the director approaches these subjects with enough sensitivity in a way that also feels humanistic. You can tell how personal this is for him based on his deep, darkly funny dialogue and how his protagonist’s grief manifests. In his third collaboration with Cronenberg, Vincent Cassel embodies a sense of calm – playing against type – even as his character goes down a hole of angst and paranoia. He approaches the world with a grand curiosity rather than trepidation or mania. No business expansion or mystery is enough to fill the hole of sorrow that’s within him. Many parallels have been drawn between the main character and the director, from their hairstyles, shared atheism, and very similar loss. Perhaps the burial shrouds are a way for the filmmaker to illustrate his own beliefs on body, soul, and the afterlife. Though not as graphic as Cronenberg’s past films, The Shrouds is a bold, more introspective undertaking from the director that requires the viewer to look underneath its characters’ fleshy parts. His body of work reaches a new height that subtly raises the question of where and how far we would look for signs of our dearly departed.”

Here’s the official synopsis:

In an eerie, deceptively placid near-future, a techno-entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has developed a new software that will allow the bereaved to bear witness to the gradual decay of loved ones dead and buried in the earth. While Karsh is still reeling from the loss of his wife (Diane Kruger) from cancer—and falling into a peculiar sexual relationship with his wife’s sister (also Kruger)—a spate of vandalized graves utilizing his “shroud” technology begins to put his enterprise at risk, leading him to uncover a potentially vast conspiracy. Written following the death of the director’s wife, the new film from David Cronenberg is both a profoundly personal reckoning with grief and a descent into noir-tinged dystopia, set in an ominous world of self-driving cars, data theft, and A.I. personal assistants. Offering Cronenberg’s customary balance of malevolence and wit, The Shrouds is a sly and thought-provoking consideration of the corporeal and the digital, the mortal and the infinite.

Check out the official trailer below.

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