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.
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