Janus Films | Sideshow debuted the official trailer for David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, the body horror film starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce and Sandrine Holt.
In the film, Vincent Cassela is a tech entrepreneur grieving the death of his wife and invents a device that let loved ones watch their lost family members decompose. But when his wife’s plot is among several desecrated, he sets out to track down the perpetrator.
Directed by David Cronenberg, The Shrouds world premiered at Cannes Film Festival, then went on to screen at Toronto International Film Festival, and will open in theaters in NY and LA on April 18, San Francisco on April 25.
The synopsis reads, “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.”
“I was writing this film while experiencing the grief of the loss of my wife, who died seven years ago. It was an exploration for me because it was not just a technical exercise, it was an emotional exercise,” said director David Cronenberg whose second wife, Carolyn Zeifman, died in 2017 after been married since 1979.
The Guardian review gave the film 3 of 5 stars, writing, “David Cronenberg’s new film is a contorted sphinx without a secret, an eroticised necrophiliac meditation on grief, longing and loss that returns this director to his now very familiar Ballardian fetishes. It’s intriguing and exhausting: a quasi-murder mystery and doppelganger sex drama combined with a sci-fi conspiracy thriller which comes very close to participating in that very xenophobia it purports to satirise.”
Watch the official trailer for The Shrouds.