How the Death of David Cronenberg’s Wife of 43 Years Inspired ‘The Shrouds’: ‘Grief Is Forever’

Brent Lang Executive Editor By the end of every performance, “The Outsiders” cast is caked in grime and dust. That’s a consequence of the Broadway musical’s sandy stage, which finds the actors who bring the the gritty coming-of-age story to life each night, fighting, dancing and falling in love in the gravel.

Brent Lang Executive Editor Katherine Mallen Kupferer, one of the breakout stars of “Ghostlight,” has signed with Fusion Entertainment for management. “Ghostlight” premiered at Sundance and will be released across the country this summer by IFC Films and Sapan Studios.

Diane Kruger is opening up about how she landed her role in David Cronenberg‘s arthouse horror film The Shrouds.

There was an eight-year gap between the release of David Cronenberg’s “Maps to the Stars” and “Crimes of the Future.” Thankfully, we didn’t have to wait that long for his newest feature, “The Shrouds.” READ MORE: ‘The Shrouds’ Review: David Cronenberg Digs Into The Core Of How Messy Grief Can Be [Cannes] With “The Shrouds” debuting at Cannes, we now have our first teaser for the sci-fi drama from director David Cronenberg.

Grief is rotting Karsh’s (Vincent Cassel) teeth. It’s been four years since he lost his wife, the beautiful Becca (Diane Kruger), to a violent form of bone cancer that ate away at her body until her brittle frame could no longer sustain life.

David Cronenberg is a filmmaker who has created his own brands of sci-fi for quite some time. But even a filmmaker like Cronenberg, someone who has dreamed up what the future could look like, is amazed at what technology is capable of today, specifically artificial intelligence (A.I.).  Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival (via Deadline), where he recently premiered his latest sci-fi feature, “The Shrouds,” David Cronenberg talked about the emergence of A.I.

Ellise Shafer David Cronenberg weighed the pros and cons of artificial intelligence in filmmaking at the Cannes Film Festival press conference for his latest film, “The Shrouds,” on Tuesday. Though Cronenberg said that technological advancements like CGI have “made filmmaking much easier” in terms of tasks like removing coffee cups from footage, he admitted that it’s “quite shocking … to see what can be done even now with the beginnings of artificial intelligence.” Speaking of Sora, the new AI software that can generate motion pictures, Cronenberg said it has the potential to “completely transform the act of writing and directing.” “You can imagine a screenwriter sitting there, writing the movie, and if that person can write it in enough detail, the movie will appear. The whole idea of actors and production will be gone.

Diane Kruger is looking stunning on the 2024 Cannes Film Festival red carpet!

When his wife died, Karsh tells the blind date he has asked to lunch, he had an overwhelming urge to jump into the coffin with her rather than see her sent away alone. Instead, he contrived a way to straddle the worlds of the living and the dead, setting up a luxury cemetery where the dead are wrapped in metallic shrouds that are like camera blankets. Above ground, there are screens over each grave on which you can watch your loved one disintegrating.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “How dark do you want to go?” The man asking that is named Karsh (Vincent Cassel), and he’s seated in a minimalist art-chic restaurant having lunch with a blind date (though as she points out, how blind can a date be in the age of Google?). The one who’s really asking the question, though, is David Cronenberg, writer-director of “The Shrouds.” He’s been asking that question — to audiences — for his entire career, and to him the answer has always been the same: The darker the better.

Ellise Shafer David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds,” the horror auteur’s latest film about a widow who invents technology to see inside his late wife’s grave, received a 3.5-minute standing ovation at its Cannes premiere on Monday night. The crowd showed their respect for Cronenberg with the applause, but it was nowhere near rapturous as audience members digested the film, which is a departure from Cronenberg’s usual out-of-the-box body horror. Instead, “The Shrouds” is a thoughtful exploration of grief, and though there are several gross-out moments, the film relies on emotion more than anything.

Brent Lang Executive Editor When Cate Blanchett starts shooting a new movie or show, it’s always the same story. “It’s like Groundhog Day,” Blanchett said at the Kering Women in Motion Talks at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday. “I do the head count, and I’m back in the same place, working with men who I love working with and respect, [but] I’m walking on set and there’s 50 people on set and there’s three women.

Have you ever dreamed about being a better version of yourself? With her second film, Coralie Fargeat not only addresses this question but takes aim at ageism and sexism in the entertainment industry with a riotous, dreamlike horror-thriller that ends in a delirious symphony of blood, guts and otherwise undefinable viscera. Imagine David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive fused in a telepod with David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, add the unbelievably dynamic pairing of Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, process it through the ultra-vivid color palette that is Fargeat’s hyper-saturated imagination, sprinkle a bit of J.G. Ballard on top, and you have the perfect breakout genre movie of the year.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Shocking and resonant, disarmingly grotesque and weirdly fun, “The Substance” is a feminist body-horror film that should be shown in movie theaters all over the land. By that, I don’t mean that it’s some elegant exercise in egghead darkness like the films of David Cronenberg, or a patchy postmodern punk curio like “Titane.” Coralie Fargeat, the writer-director of “The Substance,” has a voice that’s italicized, in-your-face, garishly accessible and thrillingly extreme.

On Sunday at Cannes, Diane Kruger put her star power behind a worthy cause, attending the ‘Transcending Borders’ gala at the Campari Lounge hosted by Breaking Through the Lens—an organization that works to support female filmmakers.

Ellise Shafer With only her second film, Coralie Fargeat has gone from admiring body horror king David Cronenberg to being in competition with him at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Fargeat’s “The Substance,” described as a feminist take on the body horror genre and starring Margaret Qualley and Demi Moore, bows at Cannes on Sunday night, the day before Cronenberg’s latest frightful offering, “The Shrouds,” will do the same.

Strange but true: after 15 years as an international movie star, propelled to fame in 2004 by Wolfgang Petersen’s historical epic Troy, German-born Diane Kruger won the Best Actress award in Cannes for her first-ever performance in her native language. Fatih Akin’s provocative 2017 drama In the Fade, in which she played a widow consumed by revenge after a terror attack, revealed an unexpectedly tough new side of her glamorous persona.

Alex Ritman Julianne Moore says the film industry has “changed dramatically” since she started out in the early 1990s when it comes to female representation. Speaking as part of Kering’s Women in Motion program at the Cannes Film Festival, the Oscar winner said one of the most noticeable differences is when it comes to career longevity for actresses. “Meryl [Streep] said this too the other day [during the festival’s opening ceremony], this idea that when she was 40, she thought it was all going to be over,” she said.

David Cronenberg shocked the cinema world two years ago when he came out of retirement and showed up at the Cannes Film Festival with a new film, “Crime Of The Future.”  2014’s “Map To The Stars,” which also had a Cannes premiere, was initially supposed to be Cronenberg’s last.  Now, will the Canadian auteur’s latest, “The Shrouds,” be his swan song?   Continue reading ‘The Shrouds’: David Cronenberg Remains Uncertain If His Latest Film Will Be His Last: “I Really Don’t Know” at The Playlist.

Brent Lang Executive Editor BuzzFeed Studios and actor and comedian Lil Rel Howeryare partnering on “Saving the Neighborhood,” a new series examining the “existential threats” facing neighborhoods across America. Howery will serve as both the director and the series’s host. The first season of “Saving the Neighborhood” examines the impact of environmental racism on Black and Brown communities across the U.S.