Panic Fest 2025: David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds might just exist for David Cronenberg

The Panic Fest horror/genre film festival is currently running in KC for its 2025 season at Screenland Armour. These film reviews are from indie and studio horror/comedy/sci-fi features premiering right now in the Northland, or hitting major theaters/VOD soon. Catch up with all our coverage here and there’s still time to get tickets for individual screenings at the Panic Fest 2025 website.

Contemporary cinema’s other great David, David Lynch, described cinema as “a moving painting,” which is a useful way to describe particular schools of filmmaking. When you think of a movie as a singular work of art made up of many moving parts, it changes what you expect from the experience. A painting is an expression of a particular feeling, conveyed through an artist’s distinct style. It’s not interested in a three-act structure, world-building or a conclusive ending. A painting is concerned with themes, reaction and interpretation.

David Cronenberg is not David Lynch, but his filmmaking proclivities occupy a similar space on the cinema spectrum. He’s always been more interested in ideas and specific illustrations of those ideas than in straightforward storytelling (though some of his films do have it). When discussing Cronenberg, it’s typically his images—Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, the exploding head from Scanners, Videodrome’s TV screen lips, the bone gun from Existenz—that come up, not his characters or his plots.

The Shrouds, Cronenberg’s latest film, is not satisfying storytelling. It struggles to find a plot, playing around with a few different options before eventually abandoning all of them one by one. The film doesn’t end so much as it just stops, as if Cronenberg simply decided he’d explored everything he needed to, picked up his ball and went home. As a set of observations on life, death, and technology’s involvement in both, however, The Shrouds is a deeply personal work with a lot on its mind.

Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel) is a tech entrepreneur who’s still in mourning for his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) years after her death from cancer. That grief led Karsh to his current venture: GraveTech, a company that offers the titular shrouds. Bodies buried in Karsh’s shrouds allow mourners a look inside their loved one’s grave when they visit the cemetery via a video screen installed on their monument, allowing them to stay connected to people they’ve lost, even in death.

Just as he’s preparing to ink a deal with a dying millionaire (Vieslav Krystyan) and his wife (Sandrine Holt) to build a GraveTech cemetery in Budapest, Karsh learns that vandals have desecrated several GraveTech graves, including Becca’s. The vandalized graves appear to have been targeted — all the bodies inside have strange bone growths that appeared after their burial. Karsh enlists his ex-brother-in-law Maury (Guy Pearce) to help him discover what happened, while leaning on his sister-in-law Terry (Kruger again) for emotional support.

Cronenberg made The Shrouds following his own wife’s death from cancer, and much of the film reflects the experience of someone trying to figure out how to navigate the world after the death of their partner. Cassel’s Karsh strikingly resembles Cronenberg, with his lanky build, narrow face and poof of white hair. Karsh tries going on dates, but simply cannot get himself to be normal — every conversation winds back around to Becca and GraveTech. Even Karsh’s flirty AI assistant, Hunny, looks and sounds like Becca.

This, ultimately, is where Cronenberg’s head is really at — that and, as usual, the ways humanity’s obsession with technology has overtaken previously organic experiences and interactions. In addition to his inability to get over Becca, Karsh is totally dependent on tech. The fact that he has a self-driving Tesla becomes meta-commentary on the fact that Karsh allows technology to do all his heavy lifting for him, and that the tech he’s so addicted to is just as flawed and undependable as human beings are (in the year of our lord 2025 you could even take it a step further and say that Tesla says a lot about how much Karsh actually cares for other people, which is to say not very much).

As an artist, Cronenberg is painting with film here, exploring his feelings following the death of a person he loved, and that’s admirable. However, The Shrouds feels personal in that it’s a work which exists solely to let Cronenberg exercise some demons. For anyone not immediately on board with watching someone they don’t personally know work through some heavy stuff that has nothing to do with them, that’s a big ask.

Cronenberg has made a movie seemingly just for himself.

While that can be interesting to watch, the vague, clinical nature of The Shrouds means it’s more a work for completists than casual viewers.