On the surface, David Cronenberg’s 2025 film, The Shrouds, seems like a take on the concept of using advancing modern technology to somehow stave off the death of close ones, just like some of the plots in Netflix’s Black Mirror. This film is obviously vastly different from other such presentations, as it has all the typical touches of Cronenberg’s style, ranging from striking elements of body horror to unusual scenes of lovemaking. The plot is centered around a tech entrepreneur named Karsh, who has come up with a unique way of staying connected with his beloved wife, Becca, who passed away from cancer some four years back. As the film does not have a typical ending, and most questions raised are left unanswered, The Shrouds will definitely not be enjoyed by everyone, but it might still be impressive for fans of Cronenberg and his work.
Spoiler Alert
What is the film about?
The Shrouds begins with a hallucinatory scene of the protagonist, Karsh Relikh, peering into a sort of underground crypt, inside which the dead body of his wife, Becca, is illuminated by a glowworm. It hurts Karsh to look at the body of one he once loved so dearly, and as he cries out, the scene changes to him receiving treatment at a dentist’s, who is adamant that his teeth are being rotten by his emotions. Karsh does not believe that it is scientifically possible for human emotions to rot teeth, and he leaves the clinic with the conviction that his teeth are alright. He drives to a unique restaurant next, called The Shrouds, which is located inside a graveyard, for a blind date that his dentist has arranged.
Karsh’s date with Myrna is not very easy, as they don’t have much in common, and the conversation soon comes to their occupations. Myrna admits that she has searched up Karsh on the internet and found out that he was once a producer of industrial videos, but he states that he has done far more impressive things recently, which have been intentionally kept away from the internet. Karsh proudly reveals that he is the owner of the restaurant that they are seated in and that he also partly owns the graveyard on which the establishment is located. Myrna finds the idea of her date running a restaurant in such a morose surrounding quite off-putting, but there are many more things that she still needs to learn about the man.
Karsh Relikh is a tech entrepreneur who has invented a unique way of keeping in touch with one’s deceased loved ones, with the help of a proprietary shroud that operates almost like an MRI scanner. This unique idea had come to him after the tragic passing of his beloved wife, Becca, who had died from cancer four years ago, and her body was the first one to be wrapped in this innovative shroud before being buried. The shroud allows for the buried corpse to be viewed, from various angles and also in 3D, through a connected mobile app, and the loved ones of the deceased can watch their bodies decompose and still feel in touch with them.
After having experienced the joys of such an experience, Karsh has started a business, named GraveTech, which lets people pay and buy a service to let them watch their beloved decompose and mix with the earth. As expected, the date with Myrna does not work out, as she is grossed out by the unusual nature of the protagonist’s business. But this is the least of Karsh’s worries at present, as an act of vandalism at his high-tech graveyard poses a threat against him and his business.
Why does Maury betray Karsh?
Midway through The Shrouds, vagueness becomes a characteristic of the film, not necessarily in a negative way, though, and Maury is given a similar treatment. Maury is one of the closest friends of Karsh; in fact, he is the only male acquaintance who is seen to be close to him, and the two are related through Karsh’s business as well. Maury is a brilliant tech expert who has written the code for the GraveTech app, and he has also designed the AI assistant that the protagonist uses at all times, named Hunny. The AI assistant is much more than just a high-tech helper, though, as she is clearly modeled after Becca. Therefore, she is often overtly, and also sometimes subtly, flirty with Karsh, and there is a certain sense of mischievousness to her as well.
However, towards the end of the film, it is revealed, or suggested, that Maury has actually been working against Karsh in his own twisted way, and he has been using Becca to spy on the protagonist. The reason behind this betrayal of trust is an equally complicated motive that has been developing in the mind of Maury. Since this complication is based on a mental disorder and the resulting web of suspicion and emotions, it is more difficult to dissect than just a mere plot point. Maury is stated to have suffered from schizophrenia ever since his youth, or maybe even childhood, and although he had brought it under control in his adult years, the ailment is not completely gone.
Maury happens to be the ex-husband of Terry, the identical (presumably twin) sister of Becca, and he has still not been able to get over the separation that he believes to have destroyed his life. Much like Karsh, Maury also is overwhelmed by his longing for his ex-partner, but the situation is more complicated for him than for the protagonist because Terry is still alive, unlike Becca. Maury acts like a leech in Terry’s life, desperate to find any information about her in any way possible, and since he suspects that she is now in a romantic affair with Karsh, he uses the tools at his disposal to spy on the man and eventually turns against him.
Maury reveals that he had learned about Karsh’s affair with Terry from his computer, through the AI assistant, Hunny, and had then acted out against him out of sheer anger and jealousy. He had directly started to control Hunny, which is why the bot gradually starts to reject Karsh’s orders and even goes to the extent of teasing him about his deceased wife’s ex-lover, which has always been a matter of anguish for him. Maury then reveals that he was the one who had hired some men to vandalize the GraveTech graveyard in order to hurt Karsh’s business and even try to shut it down. Interestingly, Maury had done all of this before Karsh and Terry had gotten involved with one another, meaning that he had completely imagined the affair out of jealousy and insecurity, which is clearly part of the director’s commentary on how schizophrenia works.
But Maury’s statements are made to seem dubious when he shows his left hand to Karsh as proof that he is being pursued by the Chinese intelligence agency, who want to harm him, as two of his fingers have been severed. However, Terry later claims that Maury had lost the two fingers in high school, but he keeps the injury hidden from the world, which suggests that he lies to Karsh just to make him believe in his account. There are no solid hints about either of these statements being correct, as when Maury is seen for the first time in film, coming to Karsh’s apartment to look into the hacking, his hands appear to be completely fine. However, in a later scene, in which we see a close-up of Maury’s hands as they pick up a sandwich, he seems to either keep his fingers neatly folded, or they are indeed missing.
The bottom line is that it is quite possible that Maury is indeed being followed by the Chinese, who want to kill him, and that he has been let go with a mutilated hand as a sort of cruel warning. Or, it is also equally possible that he has made up the entire plot in his mind, with his losing battle with schizophrenia playing a crucial role in it, and he cooks up this story to bring Karsh back onto his side again. Considering that Hunny has been modeled after Becca, and the film has numerous instances of advanced and unrealistic (sci-fi level) tech, the bot might have lashed out against Karsh simply because he was growing intimate with Terry and also his new client, Soo-Min. In that case, Maury had ordered the vandalism without actually spying on Karsh’s computer, since he did not really need any proof, and he then came up with this story.
Is there really a grand conspiracy around the GraveTech service?
Another matter intricately linked to Maury’s statements is the apparently grand conspiracy in the works against Canada, its government, and its political allies through the GraveTech service. Simply put, the supposed conspiracy is that the Chinese government has been unlawfully gathering data from Karsh’s business since a Chinese tech company is involved in the manufacturing of the innovative shrouds. The Chinese have also been hacking into the software used in the technologically advanced graves in order to create their own network on North American soil and eventually expand it to other parts of the world, since GraveTech is available in a number of other first-world countries. Therefore, the Chinese essentially plan on world domination through software and data mining, and they are spooked when the men hired by Maury happen to be Russians.
Maury wants Karsh and us to believe that the Chinese government now fears that the Russians are getting involved in a similar data mining scheme through the GraveTech network, and therefore they want to kill Maury to stop it. But it is easy to question whether there is really such a high-level conspiracy in the works or whether Karsh just wants to believe all this to give his work some kind of value. His obsession with his wife, which can also be considered an unending love, is what has made him come up with the unique shrouds and the business model built on them. Perhaps the supposed conspiracy and the fact that every nation in the world wants to get involved with it give it a certain kind of importance that Karsh craves.
It is not like the protagonist is making up, or imagining, the whole scenario, as there are clearly some elements of espionage linked to the business, but we are not given enough information to get a full picture of the matter. The origin of Karsh’s business ties with the Chinese is not fully explained, and his reluctance in accepting that the governments of other countries might be using his technology to gain political power is slightly suspicious as well. If we are to consider that the conspiracy is real, then what happens next is also left a mystery. It might be that the Chinese take over the system for their own benefits after successfully convincing Karsh, through Dr. Rory Zhao, that his closest associate had completely betrayed him by engineering the protrusions on Becca’s dead body.
What happens to Dr. Jerry Eckler?
During The Shrouds’ ending, Karsh finds out that the hackers have now placed Dr. Jerry Eckler’s body in the tomb beside Becca’s, which had been reserved for himself for the longest time. There are, once again, multiple possibilities as to what had happened to Dr. Eckler and how the man had ended up in the grave. The initial theories are that the veteran doctor had been carrying out some experiments on his patients who had been suffering from cancer, because of which he had become a target for the Chinese, or the Russians, or some other hostile group. However, Karsh himself provides Terry a final theory, which clearly seems to be the most plausible, according to which he himself had ordered a hit on Eckler’s life and then buried him in the crypt that was supposed to be his, out of anger and despair.
Eckler had been Becca’s lover before Karsh had come into her life, and the two of them had been extremely close during this time. Such is Karsh’s all-consuming love for Becca that he is evidently still disturbed by thoughts of his dead wife having once been romantically and sexually involved with a different man. The jealous acts of Maury, which can even be considered as proof of his true love for his ex-partner by some, might have triggered similar emotions in the protagonist’s mind, and after getting intimate with his sister-in-law, he might have come to the conclusion that Becca could have been involved in an affair with her doctor as well. Since Terry, with all her honesty at an extremely passionate moment, exclaims that she had always liked Karsh and had wanted to be with him, perhaps Becca might have also broken free of her moral inhibitions to get back with Eckler secretly.
When Karsh later questions Terry about whether she had seen Becca with the doctor in public, after Eckler’s body has been discovered, his action can be interpreted as a desperate attempt to validate his recent actions. His decision to have him buried beside Becca can either be an act of cruel mockery, as if letting the two lovers finally unite, but only in death and also after four years of decay. Or, it might also be a sort of acknowledgement of their relationship, as Karsh seemingly takes a step back from his love and lets Becca be accompanied by her other lover, albeit after having him killed.
What does the last scene signify?
In The Shrouds’ ending, Karsh boards a plane headed to Hungary, along with his client, Soo-Min, who had originally approached him to purchase GraveTech’s services for when her ailing husband would die. But the two had gradually gotten physically intimate, and then romantically close as well, and now she outright proposes that he move into her house in Hungary with her. However, Karsh dozes off mid-flight, and when he supposedly wakes up, he sees Soo-Min bearing the same surgical wounds as Becca did in her last days, as she looks very similar to his dead wife. More strange occurrences follow, as Becca seems to confront Karsh, through Soo-Min, for having abandoned her and going away to another country after having promised to be buried beside her after his death.
The most logical explanation behind this ending scene is that Karsh’s overwhelming love for Becca and his grief at having lost her have not yet left him, even though he has made attempts to move on. For years, Karsh had nurtured strong feelings of love, desire, and lust for his dead wife, and so these emotions are not going to go away so easily. He falls asleep in the private jet, meaning that the last scene is a dream or hallucination, just like all the previous scenes in which Becca appeared to him, they made love, and then her body eventually started showing the signs of her cancer treatment, which included the surgical removal of one of her breasts and arms. In this dream, Soo-Min becomes Becca, both physically and internally, which clearly suggests that no matter where Karsh moves to, and whoever he falls in love with, his memories of Becca, and all the associated feelings, are always going to live on with him. His attempts to move on from the loss by getting intimate with Terry, romantically close with Soo-Min, and even trying to bring closure to his situation by having Eckler killed and buried beside Becca have either fully or mostly failed. Given that The Shrouds is a deeply personal film based on David Cronenberg’s own grief after having lost his beloved wife to cancer, this scene is a fitting ending to how Becca’s thoughts will very literally live on with Karsh till the end of his life.
