Compared to the very mediocre "Crimes of the Future", Cronenberg's previous effort and return to the body horror subgenre that made his fame, "The Shrouds" is a return to doing something... acceptable. But like in that previous film, in almost every scene of "The Shrouds" you are likely to think of another similar Cronenberg movie that, very likely, did it better. You might, most notably, be reminded of the awesome "Crash", which dealt with similar themes of macabre voyeurism and sexual fascination for death, physical corruption and wounds much more memorably.
That the story, which is much more elaborate than in "Crimes of the Future", goes literally nowhere, is no major issue - it is only an epiphenomenon to play with more fundamental themes. But it is still a slog to follow our rather bland protagonist through an investigation of sorts that becomes more tedious by the minute. I challenge you to actually care about any of the answers surrounding the many mysteries at the heart of "The Shrouds".
Not that you should expect any answers anyway. What matters is our protagonist's psyche, which is made clear by the opening scene (and I guess by the very last one, which made part of the auditorium laugh by its rather spectacular dropping of the story in the middle of nowhere). Yet, again, everything feels like a late variation (if not actual repetition) of things Cronenberg already did and said. What bugs me is how the protagonist never feels like he is really troubled in his psychic core by what is happening to him; Vincent Cassel, who is certainly the equal of James Woods or James Spader, is pretty good as the cool, cold tech entrepreneur who's into minimalism and crypto necrophilia, but when it comes to expressing any kind of compulsion and fascination, there simply is too little to sustain the movie. Even worse perhaps, his supposed fascination never feels real, authentic, consuming. No descent into the shadow side for our hero, no journey through the unexplored, gross swamps of his soul - or of contemporary society's.
And that is the most disappointing about "The Shrouds". How the other pole of the director's oeuvre, technology, is never actually addressed. His best horror films explore the collective unconscious, how we human beings relate to technology. How there is no real opposition between the organic and machinic but an actual symbiosis-in-coming. How we are meant by our instincts and unconscious desires to reappropriate and merge and do unspeakable things with our gadgets. Nothing like that here, with an interesting premise that is never actually explored. Featuring mobile phones, self-driving Teslas and a personal AI just feels like checking uninspired boxes. The A. I. assistant portion of the plot should, like so much else, been elaborated on, although I get the idea - behind our machinery and supposedly autonomous tech, there's us and and our unavowed, shameful longings. Too bad "The Shrouds" decides to stay on the surface rather than dig out the dead bodies that haunt our fantasies.