Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 1 - Sinners

1. Sinners, dir. Ryan Coogler

I saw Sinners three times in 2025. That does not happen for me. Usually I see these movies once, if they're lucky twice, and there's a good chance I never watch them again regardless of my opinion. At the time of writing, I want to go home and watch Sinners for a fourth time. Now, I don't really put much stock into how often you can watch a movie for rankings. Personally, I don't want to watch the same movies over and over, I want to see new things and new great things, or old great things that I haven't seen. If rewatchability were all that mattered, I would just make Tales From the Crypt Presents Demon Knight the best movie of every year, because Demon Knight is near-perfect and extremely watchable. Looking back to my Best of 2025 List,  I haven't thought at any point, "yeah, I gotta watch I Saw the TV Glow right now". It is something of a heavy meal. 

With Sinners though, I need to rewatch this... right now.

Remember when Ryan Coogler's last movie was Black Panther 2 and it was terrible? And it looked terrible and muddy? In retrospect, that issue seems to be on Disney, not Coogler, not on his DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw. Sinners looks incredible. If you had the privilege to see it in IMAX, it was the most gorgeously-shot movie of the entire year. Day scenes are huge and sweeping like the rural Mississippi Delta of the 1930s was infinitely huge, the sky never-ending. At night Sinners is warm and sensual and also full of deep black depths from all corners of the Juke Joint. It is a night where anything is possible, for good and bad. Come back of the year, clearly.

Okay, so what if you took From Dusk Till Dawn and turned it into a period-piece blues musical? You had me at the Blues, you didn't even need to add vampires that sing Celtic folk music. Sinners is already a masterpiece by the conclusion of the first act when we have a full IMAX montage of all our heroes preparing for the opening of the Juke Joint, and then a Satanic figure literally crashes in the movie. Note he crashes from above, not below, we'll get back to that. 

The great heroes of this movie are two brothers, Smoke (Michael B. Jordan wearing blue) and Stack (Michael B. Jordan wearing red) coming back to their home town after adventures in war and gangland crime, ready to live their dream of opening the ultimate night club for the sharecroppers. They're living on borrowed time already, having ripped off Chicago, buying their land from a racist good ol' boy, and having based on a business model on making a profit from the poorest of the poor in the United States. They have to know this is a good time, not a long time.

Just they could not imagine how good of a time it would be. Or how short.

Ryan Coogler's previous smash hit was Black Panther, one of the greatest Marvel movies thanks to consciously being a work of mythmaking. Superheroes are often about nothing but punching. Or they could be symbols where ones are desperately. There was no Wakanda, there was no magical space in the heart of Africa where native culture held out against colonization and could be a beacon for repression everywhere. (And the near-Wakandas that people have relied behind, Dahomey or Ethiopia were all deeply flawed places with uncomfortable histories of slavery themselves.) Smoke and Stack are not real, there was no twin pair of broad-shouldered cool guy action heroes who could march into town and scare the Klan during the height of Jim Crow. But Sinners is a myth, not reality. Why not conjure another dream of a time when you could fight back? When you could have something when the world demanded you be happy with nothing, even for a moment?

There's much more on Sinners' mind than merely sharecropper vs White Supremacists. This movie recognizes the full breath of the racial caste system in the United States. We have a Chinese couple (Li Jun Li and Yoa) who operate two separate grocery stores in the town, one on the Black side of the street, one on the White side, and we travel between these places in one long take. They get to be the "racial neutrality", fulfilling a key economic role that the color lines choke off. Then there's the question of "what are you?" when it comes to Stack's one-time-lover, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld). She can pass for fully White and could live in that world, in safety. But she's not, she's multi-ethnic, and merely existing makes her a bomb ready to go off. You can't have a beautiful woman who looks White talking to a very dark-skinned Michael B. Jordan in public. Everybody knows what happens next. Meanwhile, in the darker spaces of our myth, there is a creature that passes for human. 

Wait, a minute. I'm this deep into Sinners and I have not mentioned the main character yet! That would Smoke and Stack's precocious teenage cousin, Sammie "Preacher Boy" Moore (Miles Canton), a talented young guitarist and soulful singer who is the secret weapon of the Juke Joint. We open Sinners in media res, with a bloodied, terrified Sammie walking into his father's church, his mind flashing back to the night of horrors that he has just barely survived. His father (Saul Williams) demands that his son put down his guitar, or what's left of it, rejecting the life of sin and music it represents, and returning to the faith. Then Preacher Boy has flashes of the Devilman, Remmick (Jack O'Connell), his mouth full of teeth and eyes aglow with evil. Uniquely amongst vampire movies, Christianity fails to banish the undead in Sinners. The Devil fell from heaven after all. Also, Christianity is the magic of the Europeans, imposed on their slaves, so how could it work here? There needs to be some other power.

That power ends up being music, and the conflict of Sinners is who gets to own it. What Preacher Boy does when he sings for the crowd is unleash mysticism more powerful than any other force in this film's mythology. He can transcend time and space, instrumentalizing the entire history of African and African American music traditions into one single moment of religious ecstasy. And not for nothing is the song he's singing, 'I Lied to You', about rejecting his father's church and embracing a new path of "sin". Historically, there has been no stream of culture more heavily fought over than the ownership of Black music. As generations pass, it all gets absorbed into neutral, colorless "American music". In genres like rock or country, you'd never from where it started. You can trace the path of Delta Blues across a century from obscure Black artists like Robert Wilkins or Bo Carter to eventually James Dolan, the White talentless owner of the New York Knicks. We can't quite murder James Dolan in a movie (yet) so for now, Remmick will represent the consuming force of integration gone wrong, integration as erasure.

Remmick can quote the Lord's Prayer right back at you. However, he cannot sing like Preacher Boy. The man can sing very damn well: he comes with his own Irish ballads and can make his ghouls dance along. "The Rocky Road to Dublin" has never been so terrifying. Sharecroppers and even the White people Remmick converts are singing songs they would not know, in accents they do not have. One wonders if perhaps Remmick is not even Irish, if there was a Sinners prequel where he devoured that folk tradition first. If Sinners goes one way, you'll have a vampire with a White face singing with a Black voice. And maybe that doesn't sound so horrible, I like Rick Astley, Elvis is Elvis, I don't even hate Snow. There is the promise of the Melting Pot, or some colorless future where we can all be one people, as one vampire says. But also, we won't be one people, it won't ever be equal. It will merely be a great tradition, a great people, digested and destroyed.

Sinners has a chance of being my favorite movie of this entire decade. It is great fun, the songs be them Blues or Irish hit every dang time, you got vampires riverdancing. The script is fantastic. The screen drips with eroticism, be it Preacher Boy's bold first experience with a married woman or Hailee Steinfeld drooling into Michael B. Jordan's mouth. "I want to taste you." It's sweaty, it's raw, it's glorifying liberation. There's great gore. One vampire spends much of the movie with his face torn off and he's still dancing along. There is not a weak link in the cast. I have not had time to mention Wunmi Mosaku or Delroy Lindo or Jayme Lawson or Omar Benson Miller, and they're all perfect in Sinners. The ideas Sinners has on its mind are really interesting and complicated. It would be good enough to just be a big dumb movie about sexy people killing vampires. May nobody say that From Dusk Till Dawn does not rule! Then Sinners just does it better, with deeper ideas, and music that will be eternal.

...

So 2025 is not quite over. Stand up this week for the Honorable Mentions and Other Stuff. Don't think I won't find a space to talk about Frankenstein.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 2 - The Monkey

2. The Monkey, dir. Osgood Perkins

The Monkey is a movie I never expected out of Oz Perkins. Imagine of Celine Song's next movie were to be a boner comedy, that's how much of a radical shift left of the dial that this is. Perkins' career so far has been a series of sullen, enigmatic horror films. He's had moderate hits here or there, usually too dense for a wide audience. Which is what made 2024's wild success of Longlegs so inexplicable to me. Heck of a marketing campaign for that one, I guess. Perkins has done pastiches or direct adaptations of many horror writers like Shirley Jackson, Thomas Harris, the Brothers Grimm, so it seems inevitably he would cover Stephen King eventually. I just didn't expect him to go so silly with it. This director has been a lot of things: irrelevant shock comedy is definitely a new one. 

Perkins decided to out Final Destination-Final Destination. However, making a black comedy gross-out work in The Monkey does not preclude this movie from being very personal to him. Longlegs was a response to his father, horror legend Anthony Perkins' own closeted sexuality and death from AIDS-related complications. The Monkey is a response to an even more shocking loss, his mother, Berry Bereson's death in the 9/11 attacks. It sounds like a bad 2007 internet humor joke: "your dad died of AIDS, your mom died on 9/11, haha". To borrow the line of a character in The Monkey: "shit, man, that sucks". (The Monkey is the kind of movie to have a character whose only role in the script is to say that one line about twelve times.)

What else can you do with a life history that was, to use the correct term, absolutely fucked except find a way to laugh at it?

The Monkey is about two twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn (Christian Convey as children, Theo James as adults) who have just reached their nastiest phase of middle school puberty. They discover an inheritance from their long absent, probably dead father (Adam Scott in one scene), a magical evil wind-up toy monkey that kills people once you turn its crank. And yeah, the verbal metaphor for masturbation is not lost on this movie - "he's playing with his monkey!" teases Bill to the entire class to humiliate his brother Hal. One of the first victims is Hal and Bills' babysitter, Annie Wilkes (Danica Dreyer). This happens as she takes the boys out for a nice meal, and is visibly aroused by a hibachi chef. The two boys are not yet able to fully process this show of adult sexuality. Then they never get a chance to, because the Monkey slams his cymbals together and much of Annie's head splits in half. The get more Freudian, the Shelburn twins are jealous for their mother, Lois (Tatiana Maslany)'s affection, and well, crank the Monkey with terrible results.

And yeah, I did say Annie Wilkes - she's that Annie Wilkes, Kathy Bates from Misery. I'm not really sure what to do with that, does not seem anything. There was a ton of Stephen King adaptations in 2025: some really bad (that IT series), some really good (The Long Walk), some simply not interesting (The Running Man remake). The Monkey feels like the most King-like(?)/Kingly of them all. It is unfaithful to the source material, though actually by deviating, Perkins made it more idiosyncratically Stephen King. He put more King than King had in there.

The original short story The Monkey is based on is not one of King's best or his most memorable. It does not go to the level of cartoon horror that Perkins takes it to. (For instance, he casts himself as the boys' uncle, and we're told after his wild and elaborate death death, his body looked like smashed cherry pie, cut to the coroner opening up a body bag full of smashed cherry pie. Delightful.) That story is just about a father and son getting rid of an Evil Object, trying to overcome the family curse. You'd never guess that most of what is iconic King details were not there, that was Perkins adding them. The ribbing between Hal and Bill feels like the way King writes kids, all spectacular vulgarity and lewdness. Gallows humor is aplenty in King. The Monkey has a mother screaming while running in a circle in a circle as she pushes a pram that is completely on fire, and King's lone directorial effort, Maximum Overdrive has things like this.

Now if neither of those things sound funny to you, I don't think The Monkey is going to work for you.

The Monkey is the kind of movie where we get a classic Final Destination Rube Goldberg kill set-up: a pretty woman is about to jump into the motel pool, and a broken air conditioner means the water is dosed full of killer volts of electricity. You know what's coming: she drives in and screams and screams, maybe a gore effect. Except, you don't know what's coming. She doesn't electrocute herself, she explodes! The second her body touches that pool, she's goes out like a fire cracker. How does that make sense? I don't know. Why was a woman swimming at 2 AM anyway all alone at night? This movie sets up a wedding skydiving service, and you better believe that card is going to get played. If you think The Monkey has hit the limit of how gonzo it will get, you're wrong, it has just one more gag up its sleeve.

Hal and Bill never learn to work out death. (Though who does, really?) Hal grows up to work in a supermarket with a very distant teenage son, Petey (Colin O'Brien) who is about to be legally adopted by another man. Bill makes... I won't spoil it, but he makes different life choices. They're both living gruesomely incomplete, terribly lonely lives since their mother passed and they hid the Monkey down a well. Only the Monkey the back, of course. At the beginning of the movie, Lois tells the boys "everybody dies, and that's life". It's the second time hear something like this. The Monkey comes in a box with an engraving saying it is "Like Life". Not 'lifelike' but "Like Life", choosing the wording carefully. Life is temporary, fleeting, confusing, incredibly painful, and then it's over and really nobody knows what to say, especially the extremely young pastor at the funeral who seems like he just got hired at this job ten minutes ago. Or is high as hell. Or both.

What else can we do but turn out traumas into Troma exploitation? The boys grew up and forgot their mother's most important lesson, "The hell with it, let's go dancing." They never danced, and they did not adjust well. There's a lot of movies that wallowed in a lot of feelings in this Top 15, but I knew, The Monkey had to be the highest ranked when it comes to my favorite subject lately: death. You gotta learn to take it in stride, have a laugh, and make room to dance in the face of oblivion. Because oblivion is coming anyway, so why be miserable?

... 

But of course, The Monkey is not the best movie of 2025. We have one more to go. The competition was not close. The last one laps the field. I don't think you'll be surprised by my choice.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 3 - Superman

3. Superman, dir. James Gunn

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I gave Man of Steel too much shit. Zach Snyder isn't history's greatest monster. Was his movie really an omen that everything I thought good about America was doomed and we were on a path to madness? I mean, yeah, turns out I was right, but that wasn't Man of Steel's fault! That movie was just a complete fucking piece of shit, top to bottom. It didn't end democracy. To call our depiction of Superman as some kind of barometer of the state of the country at large was silly of me. We have a great Superman movie now and you'd never believe how bad things are right now.

Still can you imagine being Zach Snyder right now? I don't think I could show my face in public! Imagine being the guy who made Man of Steel thinking you were smarter and could "fix" this character for a cynical modern audience who didn't want to be lectured about right and wrong. Then you failed completely, and you get to sit down and watch somebody else go ahead and just make... Superman. Turns out all we needed was Superman all along. This movie seems effortless. The action is great, the characters are wonderful, its goofy in the right ways, Superman has a dog! You'd never believe Man of Steel could have happened after watching Superman. 

Superman is black and white morality, always has been. Superman the movie presents this pressure of complicating the issue. The last son of Krypton (David Corenswet)'s own girlfriend, Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) grills him in an interview, playing the hard-hitting journalist. This is just on the heels of stopping a war involving Not-Russia clearly about to invade Not-Palestine (a sorta medley of just-disguised-enough 2025 geopolitics). The journalist in the room is pushing objectivity and demanding answers, "who is Superman to do any of this?" and Superman is not media savvy enough to come up with a response. You leave this scene thinking our hero is untested and unsure. Except, Superman was right, even here, even when he loses the debate. What a perfect statement about the state of media right now, with journalists wasting their time trying to push a "balanced" viewpoint, so busy with appearance of un-bias that they're useless, in forced blindness to reality.

I guess we should be happy there even is still a newspaper media in Metropolis. It is sorta charming for any of what they do to matter. 

The villain of Superman is Elon Musk, a guy everybody learned to hate in 2025. Even Donald Trump got sick of his shit. I mean, sorry, the villain is the totally fictional character, Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), a man who knows exactly how to play the media, the government, and even Superman. Where Superman sees the best in everybody, Lex sees what is useful to him and what is not. There's a whole cult of Luthor freaks following him around, worshiping him as a god that he very much isn't. The actual god, the super man people brings together and promises us that better things are possible. Lex gets his power from telling us nothing is real or good, or even possible except him.

Superman is not an origin story, if anything this is a remake of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. We open with Superman already out here, fighting big weird stuff. We're in full Silver Age comic book swing. One positive of twenty years of the MCU is that superhero movies can just be themselves, they do not need to bother explaining or justifying any part of their genre anymore. There's a Green Lantern (Nathan Fillon), this alien guy has elemental powers (Anthony Carrigan), there's a big Stitch-Godzilla thing. Don't worry about it. James Gunn's best joke is having an important Lois and Clark conversation framed against while a window while in the background the other superheroes fight some space creature from another dimension. It isn't important. that's just life in Metropolis these days. 

I'm impressed by how much James Gunn kept Superman a James Gunn movie. His whole career has been about misfit failed superheroes, The Specials to Super to Guardians of the Galaxy, so you'd worry he'd lose something when depicting the ur-superhero here. However, in a way, Superman is a weird misfit too. Even the most perfect man alive is kind of a dork who says things like "maybe that's the real punk rock" when confronted with thinking too many people are too good.

James Gunn is really good at pulling the heart strings. Superman's struggle for identity and family is as powerful as anything else Gunn has done. I think I cried harder at this than the little animal guys suffering in Guardians of the Galaxy 3. I almost cried telling people about Superman's ending and how perfect it was. I might cry now thinking about it. 

Not to spoil anything, but we are not our histories. We are not our ancestors. Let's say Superman is once again a metaphor for America. Well, he doesn't need to be defined by whatever happened before, neither do we. America today is not the nation of slave owners, capitalists, racists, and con artists, unless we let it. We are not the sum total of all the sins of the past and doomed to suffer in guilt and punishment, and cursed to repeat endless cycles. Recognizing what is wrong and what was a lie is one thing, but still we can be anything, even the illusions we thought we were. We can be fucking Superman. We can defeat evil and be the greatest society in history. Better things are possible, even at this late date.

There's a lot of awful emotions in the world and a lot of pain to work through, maybe we need a movie that is good, bright, and offers better worlds like Superman.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 4 - Marty Supreme

4. Marty Supreme, dir. Josh Safdie

You watch Marty Supreme and you wonder how this little wormy fucker is getting away with it. The Safdies (or well, Safdie singular now, I guess) have/has made an entire career out of guys whose lives are frenetic unstable horrors. This is a specific type of New York guy, you can consider them the Safie (singular) Hero. They cause all kinds of damage all around them, and all of it was for nothing to begin with. Connie will never get back to robbing banks with his brother in Good Time, in Uncut Gems the rock Howard thinks will solve all his problems is not worth half of his claims. These guys burn through every credit line, be it financial or social, which would be deeply humiliating if they were capable of shame. As they sink deeper and deeper, they wander off into tangential sidequests that get them only further form the goal, spreading yet more chaos.

The thing with Marty Supreme is that uniquely amongst these Safdie (singular) Heroes, Marty (Timothée Chalamet) has a there there. This was not entirely quixotic. Marty Mauser is a great athlete, he actually can do everything he promises - or at least 99.99% of it. Maybe table tennis isn't the most glamorous of sports compared to say, football, but it still can be incredible on the screen. The Safdie (singular) is showing that Marty is capable of superhero things with a paddle and a ball. Mr. Supreme doesn't win the championship in England, since otherwise there would be no movie. However, winning second place is pretty damn impressive. In any other circumstance other than Marty's, it would be very profitable. Being just as good as your arrogance has a draw back though, because our boy cannot imagine failure to the point he isn't ready for a real challenge. Another athlete, Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) gets to live the dream, and he wasn't half as obnoxious on the way to getting there.

Marty's most tragic flaw is that he's a great on the mic, and great on the table, but he's a terrible conman. That's a bad trio of traits to have. There is not a single lie he tells, a single shortcut he takes, a single scheme he runs that does not result in further problems for him. All the Safdie (singular) Heroes are digging their own graves, all of it is avoidable. They could turn back and be forgiven at any time. At worst, Marty can live a solid working class life in 1950s New York with a close family, friend circle, and a job at his uncle's shoe store he hates, though won't ever get fired from. With some patience he could be back winning tournaments. Instead Marty robs his uncle for plane money, dumps a huge hotel bill with his ping pong event organizers, gets his female best friend, Rachel (Odessa A'zion) pregnant, and then doesn't take responsibility for any of this. When all these bills come due at the same time, Marty goes on a crime epic of increasingly stupid stunts, trying to do more bad cons to make up the ground his failures cost him. It is all one step forward, three steps back.

Like, crime is bad, sure. However, sometimes it does pay and pay very well. Not for Marty, he sucks at it.

Marty is going to cause a great deal of ruckus in his weeks' long adventure to try to get out of Manhattan and onto a flight to Tokyo to try to compete in his second table tennis tournament. He's sort of an inverse Inside Llewyn Davis, where both period piece heroes are stuck in their own traps, unable to escape from their cycles of recurring errors. Davis thanks to severe depression and Marty thanks to alarming levels of self-esteem. One is chasing after a cat, the other is chasing after a dog. Only Marty Supreme is way more chaotic. Even taking a shower causes the bathtub to crash through the floor onto an old man (Abel Ferrara)'s arm.

I guess I get it. Marty does have his boyish charms, he is played by Timothée Chalamet, only slightly uglied by some pockmark make-up and a mustache I'm not sure about. He can charm his way into Rachel's heart or the bed older movie stars (Gwyneth Paltrow). You can even see why cuckholded rich husbands (a stunt-casted Kevin O'Leary) cannot throw Marty out with the trash. There's braggadocio mixed with a paradoxical ptiy. He calls his talent a "burden" at one point, as if he were the Kwisatz Haderach of ping pong. I don't think anybody is fooled by Marty, he only gets by because they see right through him. If he were a better conman, he'd be truly all alone.

Marty Supreme feels huge despite being about one scumbag. It's a shame is that the Safdie (singular) only shoots two or three big table tennis sequences. You want more. There's much more movement, space, and action than you'd think possible with just a little table and a net. Marty is running around stages and venues, making incredible shots. If you just measure your movie by how much is in it, how much really awesome stuff you get for the price of admission, Marty Supreme is one of the best of 2025. From a recreation of Lower East Side Jewish New York to dancing in the road next to a moving car to goofs with the Harlem Globetrotters to a shoot out with Penn Jillette, the Safdie (singular) has delivered a feast here. There's even a vampire in this movie!

A critical conversation in Marty Supreme happens with Marty's fellow Jewish ping-ponger, Bela Kletzki (Géza Röhrig). Marty has Bela recount a story from the Holocaust to impress a person at lunch. In the story, Bela finds a honeycomb out in the woods, smokes out the bees, smears honey all over his body, and lets the prisoners in his cabin lick his entire body. You can see the awful grin on Marty's face here. He hears this story and loves it, for the wrong reasons: the shock value, the perversion, the weirdness. What Bela did was much more than that. He was using his body in this motherly act of caring for other people in impossible circumstances, granting them sustenance and sweetness for could very well be the final time.

We end Marty Supreme with none of our boy's lofty ambitions achieved. Whether he deserves it or not, he is given another chance. And in the final scene of this movie, Marty might unlock the parts of him that are missing. He might finally understand why you would let dying people lick the honey off your chest.

Top 15 Movies of 2025: No. 5 - The Shrouds

5. The Shrouds, dir. David Cronenberg

My two favorite directors of all time are guys named Dave. One of these Daves, Lynch, passed away last January. In the last Top 15 I had to ditch a review of Dune 2 to talk about his legacy and one of my favorite movies of all time. The other Dave, Cronenberg, made one of the best movies of 2025, a bleak statement of mourning and his own mortality. Nobody knows how many more films the Elder Cronenberg has in him. The Shrouds consciously acts as a finale. This could be it. Dave's farewell is troublesome, disturbing, and somehow made greater by its incompleteness. You could not ask for a more proper swan song considering Dave's body of work.

Vincent Cassel is playing Dave. I mean, sorry, he's playing "Karsh", an aging Toronto-based widower who favors black clothing and has striking gray hair. Probably just a coincidence. At one point in his career, Karsh was a director of "acclaimed technical films". Now he has moved on to a unique SciFi premise to deal with his grief. Cronenberg/Karsh both lost their wives of many decades in the recent past. The fictional version has transformed her body into a kind of art piece, just as our director has transformed his confusion and grief into The Shrouds. The SciFi concept we're given is that you can wrap your loved one's corpse in a high-tech burial shroud, allowing you to see a 3D model of their body. There is a fancy graveyard with screens and bodies within. But also, on your phone, you can pull up the corpse and see the process of decomposition in real time. Apparently there is comfort in watching the remains transform from recognizably your loved one to a mummified approximation, to a dried out ecosystem of lingering bacteria and parasites, to the final reclamation by nature into true nothingness. 

Many of Cronenberg's films have been about doubles or a mirrors of identity (Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch, eXistenZ, etc). His stories are often a dreamlike cycle where characters appear and re-appear. That is also all over The Shrouds. Karsh is haunted by memories of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). What had to be months of a terrible slow illness is depicted in his mind as one night. His nude wife walks in and out of their bedroom on the doctor's orders, each time returning with parts of her body taken. Becca is gone at the start of the film, though she reappears in many guises in The Shrouds. There is her cool hippie sister, Terry (also played by Diane Kruger). Karsh has an AI assistant on his phone, Hunny, who is the spitting image of his wife. Even other women that Karsh starts a relationship with, such as the mysterious Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt) become echoes of Becca, her body somehow carrying the same scars.

There's something to this sense of mourning as amputation. I think of the people I lost as being like a missing limb. (The resonance is not lost on me, before the end my Grandma had to have a leg cut off.) And just like adjusting to a lost body part, you have to accept a new reality where there are things you cannot do, patterns of conversation you cannot have any longer. The pain of mourning is almost a phantom limb syndrome, as your nervous system struggles to adjust to processing to a new world with somehow much less data. You can find yourself stuck in time, living both in the present and the past. New people who come into your life can feel to be echoes of people who are gone. There are ghosts everywhere if you look for them.

There is also a movie here. The Shrouds is in theory a tech thriller. Karsh is stuck in a confusing web of conspiracies and counter-conspiracies. Somebody is sabotaging his tech company just on the eve of a major expansion. Is it the Chinese? Is it the Russians? Is it these growths on Becca's bones that Karsh cannot explain? Was she some bizarre medical experiment? Is this all an invention of Karsh's best friend and Terry's ex-husband, Maury (a very disheveled Guy Pearce)? Is Maury jealous of Karsh or is he jealous of Terry when they sleep together? Why does everybody keep talking about going to Budapest?

At one point, The Shrouds was going to be a Netflix series. Two episodes were planned at one point, The Shrouds seems to be the remnants of those scripts. I'm reminded of the other Dave's great movie, Mulholland Drive. They're both pilot episodes that gesture at a greater narrative that will never happen, with various plot threads torn out and spilled all over the floor. However, Mulholland Drive ends up being a more complete work and a stronger statement about guilt, sexuality, and jealousy than if it had ever answered who was ruining Justin Theroux's movie. The Shrouds is more powerful because all its genre conventions are made utterly meaningless. None of the tensions ever get relieved by an answer. There's just the terrible uncertainty of what's coming. Nothing really does come, we're just left with Karsh being unable live in the past or the present by the time the movie concludes.

What does Budapest mean? I have no idea. It probably doesn't matter. We end the movie with Karsh on a flight there. Budapest is the place we all go, inevitably. With some things accomplished, some things unfinished, fewer answers than we'd want, and maybe, our loved ones still waiting for us in some form or another.