Movies
David Cronenberg’s ‘The Shrouds’ Sets Spring Release Date [Teaser]
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.”
Producers of the film are Saïd Ben Saïd, Martin Katz and Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent.
David Cronenberg’s also recently directed Crimes of the Future, which brought the filmmaker back to his body horror roots. The 2022 film is currently streaming on Hulu.
The release date for The Shrouds also brings a new teaser. Watch below.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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