David Cronenberg’s ‘The Shrouds’ Sets Spring Release Date

After acquiring horror master David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds after the film’s North American premiere at TIFF, Sideshow and Janus Films has set a Spring release date, Deadline reports today.

The Shrouds will open on April 18 in New York and Los Angeles, before expanding nationwide on April 25, 2025.

Vincent Cassel (Irreversible, Eastern Promises) stars alongside Diane Kruger (Inglourious Basterds), Guy Pearce (Memento) and Sandrine Holt (“Fear the Walking Dead”).

In the film, “Karsh (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.”

As Joe Lipsett wrote in his review, we can expect The Shrouds to be among Cronenberg’s more personal works. Lipsett writes, “Cronenberg is on record that the film is heavily autobiographical. He lost his longtime wife of 38 years back in 2017 and Cassel is a dead ringer for the director – from the hair and costume, right down to the dry and slightly deadpan vocal inflection. The Shrouds is clearly a personal mediation on the director’s own struggles with grief and loss, but even beyond its ties to his lived experience, the film plays like a pastiche of Cronenberg’s prior work and interests.”

Cronenberg previously explained of the project, “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. 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.”