Vincent Cassel stars as a grieving widower who invents technology that allows family members to watch their loved ones decompose as they lie in their grave. If that doesn’t sound like an idea for a David Cronenberg movie, I don’t know what does. Naturally, he uses the tech often as he obviously has trouble letting go of his dead wife. When vandals desecrate her grave, Cassel teams up with his brother in-law (Guy Pearce) to find the culprits.
Cassel, with his gaunt appearance, steely eyes, and slicked back gray hair, kind of looks like Cronenberg if you squint hard enough. He commands the screen with his soft-spoken charisma. He also has a lot of chemistry with Pearce, who is entertaining as a kooky techie. Diane Krueger is quite good too as Pearce’s ex-wife, who kind of has a thing for Cassel.
Perhaps sensing that the slim premise would not fill a two-hour movie, Cronenberg instead uses it as a jumping off point as he spins the plot off into a Phillip K. Dick sort of tech noir detective story. While initially intriguing, he just can’t really sustain the tension throughout the entire picture. It’s watchable, sure, but overall, it’s pretty low key and is sorely missing the visceral impact of Cronenberg’s best work. All the stuff with the international high tech graveyard espionage, while novel, doesn’t exactly land either. However, die-hard Cronenberg fans will recognize passages like that to be a feature and not a bug.
The Shrouds works best as a somber and depressing examination of grief. I guess the best description of it is misery porn. In fact, it contains a scene where two lonely people fuck and use dead relatives and medical procedures as part of their dirty talk during the act. It’s almost enough to make the sex scenes in Crash seem quaint.
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