In his latest treatise on broken bodies, David Cronenberg presents us with among the more chilling concepts he’s ever put on screen, then neuters it with middling execution. Thematically, The Shrouds has the most in common with one of his most difficult sits, Crash (1996), where characters experience a psychosexual thrill from being intimate with people who’ve been maimed in automobile accidents. The neutering part is that it’s all conveyed in a humdrum, low-stakes manner that never fully engages.

The chilling concept, though? It’s pretty chilling. Cronenberg offers us a protagonist, Karsh (Vincent Cassel), who has pioneered a technology where grieving family members can watch a real-time stream of their deceased relative as they decompose in the grave. They are wrapped in a special burial shroud that enables this feed.

For those who can’t let go – including Karsh, who lost his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), to cancer four years earlier – it could be some sort of twisted balm that allows them to separate from their loved one more gradually. Karsh explains that Becca was Jewish, where it is believed that burial, rather than cremation, allows a soul to slowly detach from the body it has always called home, before ultimately ascending to heaven sometime later.

The technology, and Karsh’s obsession with it, skeeves out an otherwise open-minded blind date, but Karsh will have plenty of other contenders for his romantic affections. The first of these is Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt), the blind wife of a CEO who wants to expand Karsh’s GraveTech cemeteries to foreign soil. (The film takes place in Canada, naturally, for Canadian Cronenberg.) The second is Becca’s own twin sister, Terry, who comes with the baggage of an ex-husband Maury (Guy Pearce) who set up the GraveTech network, but has also suffered bouts of schizophrenia.

When a number of headstones are vandalised, including Becca’s, and the network hacked, Karsh must dig deeper, no pun intended, to see if he can figure out what’s going on here, and why he can see some strange objects inside Becca’s rotting skull that appear to be artificial. He’s got assistance in yet a third form of Becca, beyond her twin sister: An AI called Hunny, which uses Becca’s voice.

It’s hard to write the plot synopsis for The Shrouds and come to any other conclusion than that this is a very interesting stew of ideas, promising one of Cronenberg’s best films. It doesn’t materialise. While Cronenberg has rarely directed his actors in a manner that competes with the audacity of his subject matter, his direction here feels particularly restrained. Not to the point of boredom, exactly – The Shrouds is watchable from moment to moment – but to the point of general shrugginess. It creates a sensation in the viewer that it’s difficult to tell where this story is going, whether it will get there with any urgency, and whether we will care when it does.

That’s not to say there is no material of interest here. One of these is an impressive multi-faceted performance from Kruger, who plays not only the amputee Karsh sees in his dreams – Becca’s cancer made her bones brittle and robbed her of various parts of her body before she passed – but also the twin sister, and the voice of the AI to boot. Now approaching 50, Kruger exposes herself as she wouldn’t have done earlier in her career, both physically and emotionally, and it’s rewarding to see this from an underappreciated actor who hasn’t been in front of our eyeballs a whole lot lately.

Pearce also has some scenery to chew on, but in a good way, as the greasy and unwashed programmer, who is mixed up in all this in ways that will reveal themselves as the narrative goes. Pearce is finding himself in a really fertile portion of his own career in which he’s never presenting us the same character twice, and this is a new look for him.

It’s just that the connective tissue between all these fascinating notions, which really do feel like a highlight reel of the writer-director’s career (eXistenz and Crimes of the Future are also relevant texts), is a bit flimsy, and worse, a bit undercooked, particularly in its presentation. Aside from the fact that there are dream sequences and the technology itself is a bit, but maybe not too, far-fetched, Cronenberg opts for an extreme form of naturalism that feels a bit uncinematic. Take Karsh, for example. For someone clearly so damaged that he has turned his obsession with his wife into a new industry of ogling the dead, Karsh strikes us as very normal in most respects, unassuming even, and Cassel plays him that way, though certainly not without the encouragement of his director.

Is this Cronenberg’s point, that within all apparently “normal” people there lurks a deranged obsessive? It could even be a thesis statement for his whole career. It’s just unfortunate that in The Shrouds, it’s all a bit shrouded – left for us to excavate, when we may not have sufficient inspiration to do so.

 

The Shrouds opens today in cinemas.