Iconic director David Cronenberg has been grossing audiences out for over fifty years. From genre-defining body horror, such as The Fly (1986) and Videodrome (1983), to his more introspective dramas like A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007), Cronenberg has never shied away from putting the audience in uncomfortable positions, and The Shrouds continues that theme.

Karsh (Vincent Cassel) is the owner of a company called Grave Tech, which, after death, will wrap a corpse in a shroud that provides the family with access to watch the body as it slowly decomposes while it is underground through a screen on the headstone. Karsh is still reeling from the death of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), and watches her on the screen often. When his cemetery is vandalised and his Grave Tech equipment hacked, he enlists the help of his former sister-in-law, Terry (also Diane Kruger), and her divorced husband, Maury (Guy Pearce), to regain access to the system.

Cronenberg’s wife, Carolyn, died in 2017, and this feels like a film created through the grief that Cronenberg felt during the period after her death. Karsh created this technology because he wanted to be in the coffin with her whilst she was being lowered into the ground, and is still haunted constantly by dreams of when Becca was alive and slowly dying. There’s something very odd and voyeuristic about watching a corpse as it rots, and there’s only one man in the world who could make a film about this. There is also something oddly romantic about the whole film; it feels like his most romantic film since…Crash (1996)? The sex scenes feel appropriately placed and well shot, and you are actively rooting for the sub-plot in which Karsh has sex with his sister-in-law —the things Cronenberg will make you root for will always surprise you.

The dialogue of the script is quite awful; a great deal of the lines spoken by Cassel feel clunky and out of place. This may be due to Cassel’s miscasting in the lead role — I do believe that he was mainly cast on the basis that, when he wears sunglasses, he bears a striking resemblance to Cronenberg himself. Someone like Viggo Mortensen would have elevated the script, but Cassel’s delivery only worsens it. Guy Pearce is painfully underused. We know from The Brutalist that if you give this man a proper role, he’s going to knock it out of the park, but in The Shrouds, he is forced to play a meek and cowardly man with hardly anything juicy to do.

The technological aspect of the film feels quite jarring and stretches your suspension of disbelief to extreme levels. Still, Cronenberg has been accurately predicting future technological advancements for so long that a rogue AI personal assistant and grave cameras may not be too far-fetched after all. If you’re interested in watching something weird and sexy, this might be the perfect film for you – just be prepared to witness the oddest first date scene in cinematic history.