‘The Shrouds’ Review — David Cronenberg’s wryly funny meditation on grief

A review of the strange new film, in theaters April 18th, 2025

“Tell me about this body thing,” asks Terry (Diane Kruger), speaking to her dead twin’s grief-addled husband. “You’ve made a career out of bodies.”

She may as well be talking directly to director David Cronenberg, a man who’s made a career out of his interest in bodies on screen. He’s a filmmaker fascinated by how the body interfaces with technology, by how we are molded by and melded to and irrevocably changed by the ways we interact with the inventions that fill the world around us.

Terry’s dead sister’s bereaved husband is Karsh. As played by Cronenberg regular Vincent Cassel, he’s a dead ringer for Cronenberg himself, all thin and gangly and dressed in black, a combed-upward shock of white hair his defining feature. Karsh is an inventor, a man who used to produce films (!) who was driven by grief to craft a new form of camera. He’s invented what he calls “the shroud” — made by his company GraveTech — because when his wife was lowered into the ground four years earlier, dead from a cancer that ate her body away, he was driven mad by the fact that he would no longer be able to see what happens to her body. The Shroud, then, is a camera in cloth form, a burial…