We’re now just a week away from the Cannes Film Festival premiere of the highly anticipated next feature from David Cronenberg. The Shrouds, led by Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce, and Sandrine Holt, has now debuted its first footage with a 30-second teaser ahead of the premiere.
Here’s the synopsis: “Karsh, 50, is a prominent businessman. Inconsolable since the death of his wife, he invents GraveTech, revolutionary and controversial technology that enables the living to monitor their dear departed in their shrouds. One night, multiple graves, including that of Karsh’s wife, are desecrated. Karsh sets out to track down the perpetrators.”
“Most burial rituals are about avoiding the reality of death and the reality of what happens to a body. I would say that in our movie this is a reversal of the normal function of a shroud. Here, it is to reveal rather than to conceal,” Cronenberg tells Variety, who premiered the teaser. “I was writing this film while experiencing the grief of the loss of my wife, who died seven years ago. It was an exploration for me because it was not just a technical exercise, it was an emotional exercise.”
He adds, “In a way, the shrouds that my main character has invented are cinematic devices. They are creating their own cinema, a post-death cinema, a cinema of decay. Before writing the script, I was aware that there was a cinematic aspect to the shrouds, creating their own strange grave cinema, cemetery cinema. It’s so interesting because I’m often watching movies in order to see dead people. I want to see them again, I want to hear them. And so cinema is in a way a kind of shrouded post-death machine, you know. In a way cinema is a cemetery.”
Watch the teaser below.
