Cannes 2024: David Cronenberg’s ‘The Shrouds’ receives lacklustre reception
Body horror master David Cronenberg has premiered a new movie at the 2024 edition of the Cannes Film Festival. However, despite its personal and emotive nature, his latest project, The Shrouds, received a lacklustre reception from those in attendance.
While still in somewhat familiar territory for Cronenberg, The Shrouds represents a departure from the eye-watering body horror that Cronenberg made his own with classics such as Scanners, Videodrome and The Fly. He also recently delved back into this area with 2022’s Crimes of the Future, which received a seven-minute ovation at Cannes that year and saw dozens of attendees walk out of the premiere due to its grisly and challenging nature.
This followed the director’s prediction prior to the event that people would leave, calling the audience at the French film festival “strange”.
The Shrouds stars Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, and Sandrine Holt. It is noted for its balanced and authentic analysis of grief and technology. The sickening moments that the director is known for remain, but broadly speaking, it is a more reflective movie than some of his most influential titles.
An arthouse horror, The Shrouds follows a successful businessman, Karsh – played by Cassel – who is broken after the death of his wife. As a response to his feelings, he invents the technology GraveTech, which enables living to monitor their dead loved ones in their shrouds. However, one night, several graves are defiled, and Karsh sets out to find those responsible.
After the credits rolled, the audience paid respect to Cronenberg, a legend of Cannes, but it was a markedly lacklustre response to the movie, with the ovation lasting only a few minutes. The four stars of the flick also each embraced the director as the film finished. This reception follows Cronenberg’s old friend and cinematic legend, John Carpenter, recently claiming that the Canadian takes himself “so seriously these days.”
“This is the first time I’ve seen the movie with an audience, and it’s completely different,” Cronenberg noted after the clapping finished. “I’m very happy that you are all here.”
The Shrouds was first announced in May 2022, with Cassel in the lead role. In September of that year, Crimes of the Future star Léa Seydoux joined the cast, but Kruger replaced her in April 2023. That month, Pierce and Holt also entered the fold.
Notably, The Shrouds is imbued with tangible sadness, as Cronenberg lost his wife of 38 years, Carolyn Zeifman, in 2017. In 2022, when speaking at the San Sebastián Film Festival, he described the project as “very personal”.
Netflix initially paid Cronenberg to develop The Shrouds as a series, and he wrote two episodes before they eventually pulled out. “I think they’re very conservative and for whatever reason, they didn’t go ahead with my project,” he told Indiewire in May 2022. “I still thanked them because I wrote a script and I wouldn’t have done that if it hadn’t been for their enthusiasm. “I was interested in a streaming series as an alternative form of cinema, because suddenly you’re making eight or ten hours of film.”
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