After his long-awaited return with Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg returned last year to the festival circuit with The Shrouds, a darkly funny conspiracy thriller led by Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, and newly minted Oscar nominee Guy Pearce. Picked up by Sideshow and Janus Films, they’ve now announced the Cannes, TIFF, and NYFF selection will open in NY and LA on April 18 followed by a nationwide release on April 25.
Here’s the synopsis: “Karsh (Vincent Cassel) is a prominent businessman. Inconsolable since the death of his wife, he invents GraveTech, a 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.”
Rory O’Connor said in our Cannes review, “David Cronenberg’s films have often imagined a future where technology would find a way into our collective id. 55 years into the director’s incomparable career, might that future have finally caught up with him? In Cronenberg’s new film––the slick, scrambled The Shrouds––there are two barely speculative conceits: that an AI chatbot could be designed to look like a recently deceased love one; and primarily, that a company might have the bright idea to wrap a blanket of HD cameras around our nearest and dearest before they’re sent six-feet-under, allowing us to check in on their decaying corpse, all with the click of an app.”
See the new teaser below. And while Cronenberg hasn’t formally announced his next film, he gave word at last fall’s Marrakech Film Festival that he’s going to work on a script based on his 2014 novel Consumed, which may be his next feature.