ArcaMax

Welcome to The Shrouds, an afterlife community where the dearly departed await your return and invite you, through the miracle of necro-technology, to come inside and watch them rot.

Yes, David Cronenberg is back. For 50-odd years now, the Canadian writer-director has probed the pulpy depths of body horror in a run of features that extends from the 1981 "Scanners" through the incomparable "Videodrome" (1983), "The Fly" (1986), "Dead Ringers" (1988) and "Naked Lunch" (1991) up until about 1996, when "Crash," his adaptation of the icky-ridiculous J.G. Ballard novel, appeared to take the idea of sex and highway mutilation about as far as it could go. After that came quasi-mainstream films like "A History of Violence" (2005) and "Eastern Promises" (2007) and -- proving him to be only human after all -- a pair of tedious duds in "Cosmopolis" (2012) and "Maps to the Stars" (2014).

In 2017, Cronenberg's wife, the film editor Carolyn Zeifman, died of cancer, bringing to an end a 38-year union, and his new movie deals with that catastrophe in a characteristically chilly manner. "The Shrouds" is rich in the Cronenberg mood, which is wintry even in its most jarring moments. (Two characters engaged in thrusting sex are given pause, although not to the point of panic, by the sound of one of their hip bones loudly cracking.)

The story is science fiction (as of now, anyway). We make the acquaintance of a rangy, gray-haired Toronto entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel), formerly a producer of industrial videos, now the operator of a techno-cemetery called The Shrouds at GraveTech, where state-of-the-art digital burial robes enable the in-coffin monitoring of resident corpses as they decompose. (The outdoor gravestones are fitted with external monitors to facilitate drop-by visits.) As the movie begins, Karsh is trying to explain the appeal of this idea to a woman named Myrna, with whom he has embarked upon a first date. He has already told her that he owns the Shrouds technology and the cemetery and the sleek adjacent restaurant in which they are now sitting. But she wants to know more. "How dark are you willing to go?" he asks her. Pretty dark, apparently. So Karsh tells her that his late wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), is actually still with him: "She's buried right here, just outside." Myrna, who is clearly a keeper, says, "I'd like to see her."

The movie is most effective as a rumination on mortality and grief, and it slumps when Cronenberg tries to turn it into a conspiracy thriller. We learn that Karsh's late wife had a twin sister named Terry (also played by Kruger), who was married to Karsh's unstable brother Maury (a grubby Guy Pearce, looking as if he's been chewed by weasels). Then, after the cemetery is trashed by persons unknown, we're asked to contemplate whether and why and by whom Becca might actually have been murdered. "The Chinese" are possible candidates, as are "the Russians." Or maybe there's a global conspiracy, one connected to a cache of Viking runes that's been found in Reykjavik. Possibilities proliferate. And since Cronenberg has never been a director intent on hurrying things along, these ancillary considerations further slow the movie's already unhurried pace. Has Karsh drawn the wrong kind of international attention with his plan to open a GraveTech franchise in Budapest? Are we talking espionage here? Can Hunny, the sassy AI avatar on the GraveTech app (Kruger again), clarify all of this?

I'm afraid not.

To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

----

Copyright 2025 Creators Syndicate, Inc.