Legendary filmmaker David Cronenberg: 'Technology is not alien – it's completely human'

The Shrouds may be about fictional technology, but David Cronenberg’s new film belongs right here, right now.

After losing his wife to a long, painful disease, tech entrepreneur Karsh (Vincent Cassel) turns his grief – which made him want to climb into his wife’s coffin and is literally rotting his teeth – into a viable, sophisticated business. Thanks to a burial shroud lined with hundreds of hi-res cameras and a purpose built “GraveTech” app, mourners can view a live feed of their lovers’ decomposing remains whenever they want. 

At first, the service sounds off-putting, but Cronenberg has imagined the next step of our persistent and sometimes dubious desire to extend our emotional grasp with technology.

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“It was always obvious to me that technology is not alien. It’s not inhuman, it’s completely human. It’s really an extension of us,” Cronenberg tells Big Issue. “The fist becomes a club, becomes a rock. Your eyes become screens, you use your voice as a cell phone. It’s all a projection of your body and your mind.”

The Canadian director broke out with invasive body horror movies in the 70s and 80s such as The Fly, Videodrome and The Dead Zone, but subsequent films like Crash and crime dramas A History of Violence and Eastern Promises (both starring Viggo Mortensen) shake free of sci-fi tropes to tell stories of identity, doppelgängers and desire that are chilling reflections of our society. 

The Shrouds takes David Cronenberg’s contemporary style to an ultra-modern place – the film is filled with screens, digital tampering and tech industry sabotage, all of which add a strange tension to the story’s very human grief and despair. Karsh is a direct expression of his own creator, not just because they both sport a white shock of hair. Like Karsh, Cronenberg lost his wife to illness after decades of marriage, and the way that grief consumed him led him to questions about the ways we mourn.

Unlike Karsh, Cronenberg is no tech entrepreneur. “I’ve had to point out that as soon as you start to write the script, it’s no longer about you or your wife,” he says.

“You want these characters to come to life [and] push you around. They start to say things you didn’t expect, they start to do things you didn’t really want them to do, but they’re very insistent. And you love that because it means they’ve come alive.” He clarifies: “Karsh is much richer than I am.”

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Since the film premiered at festivals in 2024, David Cronenberg has been fielding questions about the film’s autobiographical elements, which he says he’s really dealt with only once before in his 50-year career – 1979’s The Brood starring Oliver Reed as an unorthodox psychotherapist and a troubled mother with violent psychic outbursts.

“I was straightforward in telling people that it did have an autobiographical element, because I had undergone a divorce that was very painful to me, and it was somewhat acrimonious. I don’t think there’s another film of mine that is like that, other than The Shrouds.”

The Shrouds’ characters are certainly unique. The business-savvy Karsh is still close with Terry (Diane Kruger), a dog groomer and the identical twin sister of his late wife Becca. When his cemetery is vandalised and Karsh discovers impossible organic growths on his wife’s remains, he investigates the possibility of sabotage, egged on by Maury, his twitchy computer expert ex-brother-in-law, played by Guy Pearce.

Maury is a rampant conspiracy theorist, and his paranoia and delusion is another way The Shrouds feels like a mirror to our current times. David Cronenberg films often reflect the conspiratorial impulses of their political moment, but even though he insists the pandemic has not had an impact on his storytelling, he acknowledges the increased presence of conspiracy in our very online, very paranoid world. 

“It was intensified by Covid. ‘Where did Covid come from?’ ‘Was it an attack by the Chinese?’ ‘Was it a mistake?’ It offers wonderful, delicious possibilities if you want to create a conspiracy there. I think it has sharpened the company idea of conspiracy as an opening into a new reality that people have taken up. It has exacerbated, and not positively.”

Are there similarities between what an artist like Cronenberg and an entrepreneur like Karsh offer to the world? “I think there are many modes of creativity, and it gives you a way of connecting with other people. So I can relate to all of these crazed billionaire tech guys in some ways. But I don’t think [art] is the same sort of Messianic thing that is being offered with AI, saying it will change human existence in life. I mean, that’s pretty presumptuous, and I’m not sure that it’s accurate.

“I’m not really prophesying anything, and I’m not saying you should be more like these characters or beware of being like these characters. I’m exploring my own version of the human condition.”

The Shrouds is in cinemas now.

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