The Shrouds

The latest from the master of body horror, David Cronenberg, stars Vincent Cassel as Karsh, an entrepreneur who, after losing his young wife to cancer, invents a tombstone monitoring technology called "GraveTech" that enables mourners to view their decomposing loved ones via 3D imaging embedded in high-tech burial shrouds six feet under. Not since Roman Polanski cast his young doppelganger, Mathieu Amalric, to play opposite his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, in the erotic two-hander Venus in Fur has a lead actor been so intentionally styled to resemble a film's director. Thus, Cronenberg seems to invite audiences and critics to draw parallels between his latest work of fiction and his real life. The 81-year-old writer/director recently lost his wife of 38 years to cancer. The Shrouds unfolds as a very personal grief/loss picture told through the unsettling, sterile, and disturbingly erotic lens of this filmmaker.

Diane Kruger costars as Karsh's sister-in-law, Terry, as well as his late wife, and Terry's twin sister, Becca, in dreams and flashbacks. Karsh and Terry fall into a charged relationship after Karsh's "GraveTech" cemetery prototype, where Becca has been buried for four years, is vandalized. The two begin to suspect that Karsh's controversial technology is at the center of international corporate espionage. The leads have a compelling chemistry in that characteristically chilly Cronenbergian way. This is a movie about people shielding themselves from the pain of loss, but in doing so, they also distance themselves from their humanity. They are naturally drawn to finding cerebral and physical ways to reconnect with that humanity. This theme is explored in various ways, all of which are intriguing. The narrative, however, is less effective, as the plot gradually becomes less absorbing as the film slowly builds to its unsatisfying conclusion.