Grief is rotting Karsh’s (Vincent Cassel) teeth. It’s been four years since he lost his wife, the beautiful Becca (Diane Kruger), to a violent form of bone cancer that ate away at her body until her brittle frame could no longer sustain life. The loss changed Karsh’s life in more ways than one, the former producer of vaguely described industrial videos taking a sharp turn to become the sleek-looking CEO of the aptly named high-tech burial company GraveTech. 
It is at his flagship cemetery that Becca lays to rest. Well, not exactly rest, as the technology of the titular shrouds of David Cronenberg’s “The Shrouds” allow Karsh to watch as his wife’s body slowly decomposes underground. GraveTech’s eerily designed burial cloths are evolving at a fast pace; the cameras that once only offered limited insight into the dead have been recently equipped with ultra-high-resolution technology and spatial sensors that let users rotate their view of their loved one’s corpses as if they were carefully creating a character in The Sims.
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Unlike Cronenberg’s last Cannes foray, 2022’s “Crimes Of The Future,” “The Shrouds” doesn’t stretch the boundaries of its bonkers premise quite so far. Following the introduction of GraveTech’s dystopian technology, the director slowly edges away from the nuts and bolts of Karsh’s unsettlingly voyeuristic creation to dive into the spiral of paranoia that threatens to engulf the grieving man and those around him.
The Canadian filmmaker built a career out of his great interest in all matters of the body, and if “Crimes Of The Future” saw him put forward the notion of surgery being the new sex, well, here, sex is the new sex. It’s amusing to see the impossibly charming Cassel at first play a man comfortably settling into a life of involuntary celibacy. He goes on a few dates here and there, but no woman is Becca. Well, there is one woman who is a little bit, Becca, her veterinarian turned dog groomer sister Terry, also played by Kruger. One of the most excellent gags of “The Shrouds” is how it spends its first act reinforcing Karsh’s long-dormant sexuality just to unleash it as a beast in its latter half, Cassel grunting and moaning his way out of a strange web of conspiracy.
No one can prepare those walking into “The Shrouds” for just how funny Cassel’s performance can get. The actor is styled as a Cronenberg doppelganger, always wearing slim, sharply cut suits and donning the director’s signature spikey silver hair. Acting here in English, he punctuates sentences with “f*ck” and “as*hole” with not only a thick French accent but superb comic timing. Kruger matches Cassel’s commitment, shouting lines such as, “This is looney tunes! This is nuts time!” as if she’s just uncovered the web of lies at the heart of Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.”
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“The Shrouds” gets funnier and funnier as it goes on, ping-ponging from a violent attack on the GraveTech facilities to the mysterious wife of a moribund Hungarian investor (Sandrine Holt) and Karsh’s grimy former brother-in-law (Guy Pearce), who sees the traumatizing severance of his marriage as a death on its own. It is disjointed, yes, but never dull and quite magnificent to watch unravel. Out of all of Cronenberg’s body of work, this is perhaps most reminiscent of his 2014 novel “Consumed.” The book, which follows a couple of photojournalists as they travel around the world to investigate the rather unusual circumstances of a twisted French murder case, prods at themes of mutilation, a fascination with decaying body parts, and globetrotting conspiracy, all notions that permeate Cronenberg’s latest.
Much like the book, the film is unwilling to pander to those looking for neatly wrapped answers. Even if, at times, its jumbled storylines prove frustrating, “The Shrouds” is still a poignant insight into the grieving process of one of our most interesting living filmmakers and one always so beautifully attuned to notions of presence and absence. In the weeks leading up to the Cannes Film Festival premiere of the film, Cronenberg spoke in length about the sorrow of losing Carolyn Zeifman, his wife of 43 years, who died of cancer in 2017 at the age of 66. His latest is openly about this loss and the ways in which it has affected not only his life but his creative output. And what is grief if not a non-linear, mood-spanning, incongruous mess? In this, “The Shrouds” feels like one of the greatest encapsulations of loss and one we might look at more and more fondly as time goes by. [C+]  
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