The Shrouds ending explained: Does Karsh's wife come back to life?

The Shrouds is an upcoming horror drama film and has been released in cities like New York and Los Angeles on April 18, 2025. It will expand to more theatres across the United States starting April 25, 2025. Directed by David Cronenberg, the movie touches upon themes of death, conspiracy, and paranoia.

Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers for the film. Reader discretion is advised.

The Shrouds features a star-studded cast including Vincent Cassel as Karsh, Diane Kruger as Becca / Terry / Hunny, Sandrine Holt as Soo-Min Szabo, Guy Pearce as Maury, Elizabeth Saunders as Gray Foner, and Jennifer Dale as Myrna Slotnik.

The plot of the movie revolves around Karsh, a techie and businessman who has recently lost his wife to cancer. He creates a system called GraveTech that enables people to watch their loved ones' bodies decompose in real time. The bodies are wrapped in high-tech shrouds attached to cameras that connect to a screen.

The movie takes a dark turn when the graves at the cemetery, including Karsh's wife's, are vandalized. As the movie progresses, paranoia and conspiracies make him question the ethics of his invention.

Karsh's wife doesn't come back to life, however, he does get intimately involved with her twin sister, Terry. In the end, he is stuck in an endless loop of grief and desire and is unable to move on from his wife. His attempt to reconnect with his wife through his invention, GraveTech, ultimately isolates him from the living.

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What happens in the ending of The Shrouds?

A still from The Shrouds (Image via YouTube/ Janus Films)

Throughout the narrative of The Shrouds, Karsh becomes intimately involved with a woman named Soo-Min and with Terry, the twin sister of his wife. Both women are images of his wife Becca, making it hard for him to confront reality and differentiate love and loss.

His affair with Soo-Min, however, is depicted as a dreamlike mixture of eroticism, loss, and delusion, with Karsh fantasizing about his memories of Becca onto her in a trance-like state. In the climax, we witness Karsh having vivid hallucinations of his wife going through extreme surgeries, indicating the level of his unresolved trauma.

Karsh continues to wake from dreams only to find himself in another state of trance. Ultimately, there is no classic resolution. He is stuck — both mentally, physically, and emotionally — in a state of limbo created by his inventions, his desires, and his failure to move beyond them. His efforts to bridge the dead and the living with technology only deepen his feelings of isolation.

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David Cronenberg on the ending of The Shrouds

70th San Sebastian International Film Festival (Image via Getty)

In a Cannes Press Conference released on May 21, 2024, David Cronenberg delved into the ending of The Shrouds. He shared that the film was inspired by the death of his wife and carries similar themes.

“It’s not realistic, not autobiography, but somehow my experience of her death and my loss, with some other considerations… in that sense, it is my most autobiographical film,” he explained.

The ending of the movie is quite confusing and vague, and has left its viewers in a state of confusion. According to Cronenberg, however:

“The idea was it’s a dream because of his connection with his dead wife. I didn’t want to do the traditional flashback of moments. In the dream sequences, he is reliving, in a dreamlike way, the worst moments of the treatment of his wife and the surgery she had to go through, and that really continues in the plane. He wakes up, but he’s not really waking up.”

According to him, even if Karsh is going to have an affair with a new woman, it would be a blend of his past and present. It would be as if he's making love to his wife at the same time, suggesting that Karsh can never move on from his past.

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The Shrouds hits theaters across the United States on April 25, 2025.