‘The Shrouds’ Trailer: David Cronenberg Reckons With Mortality in a Gravedigging Tech Conspiracy Thriller

Dead bingers are at the center of David Cronenberg‘s new thriller “The Shrouds,” now prepping to launch in North America after debuting at the Cannes Film Festival last summer. Janus Films has released the first full trailer for the film, which stars Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Sandrine Holt and recent Oscar-nominee Guy Pearce.

The filmmaker has imagined another typically probing premise for his 23rd feature, which he conceived after his wife, Carolyn Cronenberg, died from cancer in 2017 at the age of 66. The story follows a tech innovator who is marketing a software that allows clients to watch a feed of their deceased loved ones decomposing in real time. A vandalism attack on his graves, including that of his late wife, unthreads a peculiar, potentially geopolitical conspiracy that draws in his spouse’s sister (Kruger), her ex-husband (Pearce) and his international business affairs.

“I wanted to play with the idea of paranoia. Conspiracies can be a grief strategy,” Cronenberg told Variety previewing the film before Cannes last year. “You may come to the point where you think, ‘There is no meaning to the death of this person.’ And that is really quite unbearable. The fact that it’s meaningless. And so, to find meaning, which we have evolved to seek, it is somehow comforting to think that there was a conspiracy, and that this person was part of a plan.”

“The Shrouds” opens in Los Angeles and New York on April 18, with a nationwide expansion to follow on April 25. Watch the trailer below.