Popular reviews

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★

  Inspired by the loss of the director’s wife, “The Shrouds” is a grief story as only David Cronenberg would ever think to shoot one: Sardonic, unsentimental, and often so cadaverously stiff that the film itself appears to be suffering from rigor mortis, as if its images died at some point along their brief journey from the projector to the screen. And really, what else would you expect? I suppose it’s possible that the story’s deeply personal context might have spurred Cronenberg to push against the tender sterility of his recent features, or even dare to expose the soft underbelly that’s always been hiding inside his tumorous body of work and its many layers of scary-beautiful new flesh. If so, it…

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  Review by Will Sloan 1

  Have you ever had the impulse to take a picture of dead loved one at their open-casket visitation? Maybe you haven't, in which case I'm sorry I even asked, ha ha, that's weird right? Just forget I ever said that, ha ha. But also, if you ever have... boy, do I have a movie for you.

  This is a rich text, so first impressions only. Cronenberg is of course the #1 filmmaker associated with body horror, but here he goes right to the source: disease and decay. Not to be hyperbolic, but there are feelings in here about grief and mourning that I don't think I've seen articulated anywhere else. In the post-screening Q&A, Cronenberg said that losing a wife…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½ 11

  Flesh disappearing into the virtual. Grieving for a whole world clouded by digital uncertainty. Very sad and very funny. Wonderful actors (Cassel has never being better). Chilling emotional. It made me think a lot of a less violent, more sorrowful Videodrome. Along with Ferrara’s Zeros and Ones, the greatest film about being alive in the here and now.

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  Review by CinemaJoe ★★★½ 4

  Conspiracy is the new sex! Grief eats the flesh!

  It’s a movie overflowing with dialogue, zero silence to sit with an image, which initially I found mildly irritating, but it’s possible that Cronenberg is exploring how we use conversation about anything (and everything) to cope and to avoid the pains of silence— and I prefer to choose this way of thinking.

  The biggest downside is how much the Tesla logo is on the screen. 

  Anyways, it’s one that really cooks the longer I’ve sat with it, but not shocked people aren’t vibing with it.

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  Review by George Carmi ½ 29

  New York Film Festival #9

  i wanted to sit on this one a bit longer before letting my thoughts out but i also want to get them out immediately.

  it’s tough to critique a film that touches on someone’s grief cause everyone grieves differently, but this was an insulting piece of shit in every way imaginable. cronenberg answers the age old question “what if tesla and apple collaborated for a 2 hour commercial about a man grieving his wife’s death, but not grieving the fact that cancer took her life and his love, but because cancer picked her body apart and he no longer had her body to have sex with?” this isn’t intimate. it’s disrespectful. it takes a body…

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  Review by Patrick Willems 7

  Kind of baffling but also I watched this while barely awake and I feel like I dreamt half of it

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★ 2

  Had a little bit more trouble finding my way into this one than Crimes of the Future which spoke to a very specific late style digitally remixed intersection of eXistenZ, Dead Ringers and Crash that appealed to me. But it's David Cronenberg, and despite plenty of imitators there's literally no one else who does perverted uncanny sci-fi body horror like he does.

  I think part of my reaction is that (luckily) I have not experienced the specific form of grief he is publicly working through here, one that he mentioned during the Q&A there was no book on or for because in the wake of his wife's death he read them all and couldn't find comfort in them. The thing…

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  Review by Jeff Zhang ★★★★★

  David Cronenberg handles his own grief the only he can: through a talky, corpse voyeur, techno-conspiracy non-thriller. Way ahead of its time, strangely comforting, and wildly funny. Loved it.

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  Review by Tijhuis ½ 5

  well that was a terribly long tesla commercial

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  Review by Robert Daniels ★★★★ 1

  The more I think about “The Shrouds,” the more I really like it. Unhurried, talkative, and oh so haunting. It’s one of those films that means little on a first watch, but over the coming days becomes more and more significant.

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  Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★★ 3

  “You’ve made a career out of bodies”

  six decades in and Cronenberg is still making sex an unnerving if not terrifying concept

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  Review by Katie Walsh 1

  I just have to give it up to Cronenberg for never wavering from His Whole Thing.