David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds is morbid, unsettling – and tedious

Perhaps the most Cronenbergian aspect of this extremely Cronenbergian premise is the idea that Karsh has turned his invention into a growing business. “Grave Tech” offers rich sickos the opportunity to keep an eye on the decomposition process of their nearest and dearest, through the tombstone screens or, if they prefer, a handy phone app. Karsh also has shares in an upscale restaurant offering unrivalled views of his local Grave Tech burial area in Toronto.

But the cadaver surveillance industry holds dark secrets. Karsh notices unusual growths that start to appear on his wife’s bones. Around the same time, several graves are vandalised, including Becca’s. A tangle of conspiracy theories threatens to put out the light of this already murky story. Have the Chinese harnessed the Grave Tech sites as part of a global cyber spying network? Who was Becca’s mysterious oncology specialist and why has he disappeared? What does Iceland have to do with it all? Why do Karsh’s lovers all begin to merge with the memory of his wife? The picture touches on some consequential themes: the synthetic intimacy of the digital domain, the question of spiritual succour for those without faith to nourish them. But the more threads Cronenberg weaves into this shroud, the less substantial it seems.

“You’ve made a career out of bodies.” It’s a comment directed at Karsh. But it’s a charge that could also be levelled at Cronenberg himself. Of course, the auteur of ick is by no means the only director whose fascination with the human body has driven his creative output. But what has made him such a singular cinematic voice is the fact he is less interested in physical perfection than in fragility and the many ways in which we can break.

The Shrouds, like Cronenberg’s 2022 picture Crimes of the Future, is in some ways a return to familiar territory: the arthouse, gross-out bio-horror with which Cronenberg made his name. It’s morbid, fetishistic and unsettling. But compared to the full-blooded nastiness of his enthusiastically lurid earlier works, The Shrouds, with its glum, moss-coloured photography, feels inert, woolly and ultimately rather tedious.

The main problem is the writing, both in the tendency to overload the second half of the picture with semi-realised ideas and plot strands, and in the conversational rigor mortis of the stilted dialogue. And while the brutalist beauty of Cassel’s face, with its sharp angles, chimes rather effectively with the alienating elegance of the film’s design, his performance style does not. At his best, Cassel has a prowling, athletic restlessness, but these dead words and laboured exchanges constrain him like a cage.

Kruger fares slightly better. As well as a naked, mutilated dream version of Becca, she also gets to play the character’s prickly, unpredictable sister Terry and an untrustworthy AI avatar named Hunny, so she does at least appear to be having fun – something that’s otherwise absent from this dingy mausoleum of a movie.