A new film by David Cronenberg is always a major event for all of us at Film Comment, especially after his 2022 opus Crimes of the Future was voted the Best Film of the Year by our contributors. So with Cronenberg’s latest, The Shrouds, opening in cinemas this weekend, we invited this singular auteur to talk about his strange and thrilling new movie. 

Like much of Cronenberg’s work, The Shrouds is obsessed with sex and death, body and technology. But it’s also funnier and more personal than almost anything the Canadian filmmaker has made before. Written in the wake of his wife Carolyn Cronenberg’s death, the film follows a grieving entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassell), who has invented software that allows people to monitor the decaying bodies of their deceased loved ones. When some of Karsh’s high-tech graves are vandalized, a complicated mystery arises, embroiling a number of eccentric characters—including the lookalike sister of Karsh’s dead wife, played by Diane Kruger, and her ex-husband, a software developer played by Guy Pearce.

As questions and conspiracies proliferate in the film, answers become more and more elusive. In the process, The Shrouds emerges as an extremely intelligent and moving film about our desperation for explanations in the face of the unknowable. For today’s episode, Film Comment Editors Devika Girish and Clinton Krute chat with Cronenberg about making art to process loss, the eroticism of conspiracy theories, and why The Shrouds is very much a Toronto film.