Cert - 15

Run-time - 2 hours

Director - David Cronenberg

Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel) owns a technology which allows you to see your lost ones inside their burial, however his connection to his late wife (Diane Kruger) twists when the software is hacked.

In a recent interview with Mark Kermode for Kermode And Mayo's Take, David Cronenberg stated that he doesn't view art or filmmaking as a form of therapy. While inspired by his grief in the wake of his wife's passing in 2017, grief is given little time and space in his latest film, The Shrouds.

A dialogue-heavy thriller every conversation, especially in the early stages, appears to intentionally skirt around the subject.

Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel - made to look somewhat like Cronenberg) has accepted the passing of his own wife (seen in visions in the increasingly dismembered form of Diane Kruger), but still has a series of connections with her.

Through a software he owns, GraveTech, he can see her decomposing body inside the grave through a special 3D camera. Meanwhile, he gently talks to an AI system called Hunny made by a friend (Guy Pearce), designed to look and sound like Becca, while also experiencing a fluctuating relationship with her twin sister (also Kruger).

When GraveTech is hacked, and a series of graves, including Becca's, destroyed Karsh's search for the culprits leads to twists in his relationships. Cronenberg's film is one about our relationship with the body being just as strong as that with the soul and mind.

With the sense of distance that comes in the relationships there's a coldness, too. The writer-director's recent batch of films have each had an aesthetic coldness to them, in the case of The Shrouds helped by cinematographer Douglas Koch, but his latest appears to have an extra layer.

There's something almost sinister and off-kilter about the aspects of Karsh's interactions with people. Cronenberg sets the tone almost immediately with the opening line of the film as a dentist tells the protagonist "grief is rotting your teeth."

These feelings are heightened by the coldness on display, the way in which it feels that Karsh simply hasn't been allowed the time to grieve, whether that be by himself or those around him. The dialogue is heavy but muted, the score sparingly used, it creates this feeling of withheld emotion.

As if Karsh is still floating in his emotion, but having pushed it back in order to put himself into maintaining the physical and emotional connections with Becca in the forms she takes for him since her passing.

Morbid can often be seen as a negative term, but there's a sense of it within The Shrouds that helps to push the interest there is to be found within the themes being played with. Even more so when it comes to the open admittance that this is a subject for which there may not entirely be 'answers', or even questions.

It makes for an interesting and engaging watch, although one that'll surely prove divisive, pushed by its untherapeutic attitude and demeanour.

Four stars