The Shrouds
Janus Films | Release Date: April 18, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
72
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 37 Critic Reviews
Positive:
27
Mixed:
10
Negative:
0

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyJul 10, 2025
The sick body is represented as equally tragic and sexually desirable. It’s complex, but radical, too. Read full review
100
Little White LiesDavid JenkinsJul 2, 2025
With his rumi­na­tive lat­est, The Shrouds, Cro­nen­berg once more makes a play for the heart­strings in what must be one of the most naked­ly mov­ing and rev­e­la­to­ry films with­in his canon. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzApr 18, 2025
The Shrouds, about a widower who deals with his grief by creating a new kind of cemetery where the living can observe the decay of their loved ones’ bodies, is a Cronenbergian body horror of integrity and force. Read full review
97
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzApr 21, 2025
With The Shrouds, the filmmaker – not only one of Canada’s greatest creations, but cinema’s, too – has delivered what might be his career-defining masterpiece. Read full review
91
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMay 20, 2024
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. Read full review
90
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeJul 3, 2025
Considered as an exercise in hushed mortal contemplation, The Shrouds, sombrely scored by Howard Shore, earns a spot beside Cronenberg’s best work. This is just the sort of unclassifiable oddity that the greatest directors, now less concerned with expectations, manage late into fecund careers. Read full review
90
Los Angeles TimesRobert AbeleApr 18, 2025
If this ends up being Cronenberg’s last, he’ll have gone out with a worldly, weighty epitaph. Read full review
85
The Daily BeastNick SchagerApr 18, 2025
Mordantly, head-spinningly convoluted, it’s a unique take on the director’s favorite themes, laced with bleak wit and encased in an icy chill that’s fitting for a tale fixated on the grave. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubJason GorberMay 28, 2024
Cassel and Kruger shine, but the rest of the performances feel either staid or over-the-top. Some of the story comes across as pretentious, and some of the pacing is disjointed and inelegant. Read full review
80
EmpireLaura VenningJul 1, 2025
The Shrouds certainly fits neatly into Cronenberg’s filmography but stands apart as his most intimate work. It’s a hypnotic descent into the darkness of grief, punctuated by perverse Cronenbergian pleasures. Read full review
80
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzApr 24, 2025
It doesn’t all add up; it doesn’t even all make sense. Which befits a story involving a man lost in loss, desperate to regain what he cannot. Reality isn’t as important here as feeling something. If you give “The Shrouds” a chance, you will. Read full review
80
Rolling StoneDavid FearApr 16, 2025
The Shrouds is, for all of its hallucinatory imagery and airport-read twists and turns, a blatantly personal film — arguably Cronenberg’s most personal since 1986’s The Fly. Read full review
80
The New YorkerJustin ChangApr 14, 2025
Even when purporting to tell his own story, Cronenberg cannot help but leave us with something more expansively unsettling. Read full review
80
IGNSiddhant AdlakhaMay 28, 2024
The Shrouds may seem impenetrable at first, but it grows in the mind and heart like a cancer. Let it linger long enough, and it also starts to feel like Cronenberg's most complete, self-assured, and dramatically accomplished work in years. Read full review
80
TheWrapSteve PondMay 21, 2024
The Shrouds is sober, serious and profoundly sad Cronenberg. It’s still a hell of a ride, but it’s going down a road where there’s a heavy toll. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerApr 24, 2025
The Shrouds is arguably Cronenberg’s most introspective film. His earlier work was driven by fascination, fetishization, and a puckish humor. All those elements are present here, but muted, restrained, and ultimately under an overwhelming sense of futility, as Karsh uses the shroud tech to retain a detachment from his grief. Read full review
75
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenMay 2, 2025
Before it strangely peters out, lost in its own conspiracies, The Shrouds registers as a mournful, if macabre, meditation on losing a loved one—as only writer-director David Cronenberg could manage. Read full review
75
Washington PostJen YamatoApr 25, 2025
The film also suffers from erratic pacing and half-baked reveals, but at its best, it throbs with raw, human, horrific honesty. Read full review
75
San Francisco ChronicleMick LaSalleApr 23, 2025
It’s a wail of grief, an expression of love, a testament to the body. Cronenberg puts it all on the line here, and he gets his actors to put it all on the line with him. If you don’t feel its visceral charge, you’re not paying attention. Read full review
75
SlashfilmJeremy MathaiOct 10, 2024
Some may be tempted to refer to The Shrouds as Cronenberg playing in a minor key, but that does no justice whatsoever to a chilly, almost shell-shocked drama that derives so much meaning and even poignancy out of its emotional remove. Cronenberg fans, you will not want to miss this one. Read full review
75
Slant MagazineKenji FujishimaOct 7, 2024
The film shares with Crimes of the Future an alternately intrigued and critical fascination with the ways technology encroaches on humanity, and a paranoid interest in rooting out underlying conspiracies. Read full review
70
The New York TimesElisabeth VincentelliApr 17, 2025
A dry macabre humor has long run through Cronenberg’s work, and the uncertainty behind some of his intentions here creates thought-provoking ambiguity. Read full review
70
Paste MagazineBrianna ZiglerOct 9, 2024
The Shrouds might not be Cronenberg’s most accessible or cohesive film, but it’s just as muddled as the process of coping with mortality in a world where we are pulled steadily further from what makes us human. Read full review
70
Screen RantPatrice WitherspoonMay 30, 2024
An obvious inspiration pulled from experiencing losing his wife Carolyn to cancer, Cronenberg delivers a subdued horror film on grief, which feels unlike any of his previous works. Read full review
70
ColliderChase HutchinsonMay 21, 2024
It lacks the electricity of his past works but, as we come to see, the lifelessness of it all, is, in many regards, the point of the whole thing. It's about carrying on when nothing makes sense. Read full review
67
The Film StageRory O'ConnorMay 21, 2024
Having returned to form with Crimes of the Future, it’s surprising that so much of The Shrouds falls flat: the awkward sex scenes, the general incoherence, the uncharacteristically unimaginative tech (though I did like the gothic vibe of the blanket of cameras used to cloak the corpses). That said, for a meditation on death, grief, cancer, and libido, The Shrouds is funnier than expected. Read full review
65
The Film VerdictStephen DaltonMay 23, 2024
The Shrouds feels a little unruly and unfocussed, with too many loose threads and undernourished side plots. Even so, this is still an absorbingly weird autumnal statement from one of the most consistently original screen voices of his generation, still probing away at some familiar psychosexual obsessions, this time under a gathering cloud of looming mortality. Read full review
60
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithApr 17, 2025
What started out as something that promised to be akin to a droll, twisted Coen Brothers comedy instead wanders off into reverie. And when the movie ends, critical questions are simply left unresolved. Mr. Cronenberg may not care about closure, but a movie can benefit greatly from it. Read full review
60
Time OutDave CalhounMay 21, 2024
As a storyteller Cronenberg usually tells stories with more verve and storytelling power than this. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 20, 2024
It’s a movie presented with absolute conviction and gimlet-eyed seriousness, but less wayward humour than Cronenberg often gives us. Read full review
58
The PlaylistRafaela Sales RossMay 21, 2024
What is grief if not a non-linear, mood-spanning, incongruous mess? In this, The Shrouds feels like one of the greatest encapsulations of loss and one we might look at more and more fondly as time goes by. Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterLeslie FelperinMay 20, 2024
This fetid stew of sex, death and tech may be an aphrodisiac for hardcore Cronenberg fans, but more casual viewers are likely to find it all rather slapdash and undercooked here. Read full review
50
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriMay 20, 2024
Cronenberg is transmitting to us from the borders of death, behind the enemy lines of inconsolable grief. And the man’s mind is still so alive that it seems churlish to ding this movie for being so — God, this isn’t the word I want to use, but I must — lifeless. Sadly, the inertia eventually gets to us. Read full review
40
Total FilmJames MottramMay 22, 2024
As ever, Cronenberg leaves you with much to chew on, but dramatically The Shrouds feels rather inert, as if it can’t get out of second gear Read full review
40
Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganMay 20, 2024
Its sly irony is muffled by a convoluted, fatally tedious plot. Read full review
40
The TelegraphTim RobeyMay 20, 2024
The Shrouds has potential to be morbidly hilarious, deeply twisted and strange, or rather moving: the fact that it only feints in those directions, while prioritising several less fruitful ones, makes it the steepest disappointment of Cronenberg’s late career. Read full review
40
VarietyOwen GleibermanMay 20, 2024
As The Shrouds goes on, it becomes more earnest and more nutty. I think Cronenberg thinks he’s making movies that audiences will experience as feature-length versions of his own dreams. Here’s the difference: When you’re in a dream, you believe what’s happening. Read full review
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