Starring Vincent Cassel, Diane Kruger, Guy Pearce

Written and Directed by David Cronenberg

Vertigo, in cinemas now

A recently bereaved entrepreneur – the CEO of GraveTech – is developing a revolutionary and controversial chain of state of the art cemeteries.

I was rather enjoying the first ten minutes of David Cronenberg’s latest body horror, The Shrouds. Karsh (Vincent Cassel) is having his teeth checked. He was widowed a few years previously, and the helpful dentist offers to send him his dead wife’s dental X-Rays in the hope that they might help with the grieving process. To be honest, this was not an aspect of bereavement counselling I was familiar with, but I’m open minded. Every night’s a school night with Mr Cronenberg. Anyway…  Cut to:

Karsh is on a date, the first since his wife died. The unsuspecting woman is curious about the choice of restaurant, a stylish eatery called The Shrouds, located in the middle of a high-tech new cemetery. Actually, to be brutally honest, she is nowhere near as puzzled by the idea of a dedicated cemetery restaurant as I would be, but for whatever reason she lets that pass, intrigued to discover that not only does Karsh own the restaurant but the whole cemetery and, indeed, his four years-dead wife is buried just outside if she’d like a look. Said date notices that the headstones are equipped with video screens, which seems like a nice development from the fading photographs that are increasingly popular in some parts of the world. Except the screens aren’t displaying a digital gallery of the loved-one’s most memorable moments, but rather are linked to a sort of shroud-cam with a live feed of the corpse’s rotting cadaver.

At which point I involuntarily exclaimed to the screen: ‘Swipe left, lady!!!’ before laughing along merrily with the rest of the audience. ‘This is going to be fun,’ I thought.

However…

Far from being the eccentric body horror comedy the audience was now expecting, what followed was 110 minutes of earnestly incomprehensible gobbledygook.

Okay, so Karsh notices some thingamabobs growing on Becca’s skeleton… and his AI avatar, Hunny, is helping him investigate – occasionally in the form of a digital Koala – while also introducing him to a blind Hungarian-Korean woman with a burly minder and a rather lovely black Labrador guide dog, whose husband is something to do with Budapest, and with whom he has sex (don’t worry, the Labrador is able to amuse itself on a towel), after which the GraveTech cemetery is vandalised and Karsh’s jealous ex-brother-in-law, Maury (Guy Pearce), is called in to fix the software blocking the shroud cam, and then Karsh gets involved with Terry (Diane Kruger) Becca’s identical twin sister, who is a professional dog-groomer despite training to be a vet, but is sexually aroused by conspiracy theories, which is lucky for Karsh, because despite being a man of a certain age (albeit in the form of the Gallicly good looking Monsieur Cassel) he is possibly wound up in an incomprehensible conspiracy with the Chinese, or the Russians, or the Icelandics, or no-one at all perhaps… oh and did I mention that Karsh keeps dreaming about Becca having her various appendages amputated by Dr Eckler, who she was having an affair with but we never meet but is clearly crucial to the story in some way… all tied up with a good deal of chatty rear-entry rumpy-pumpy, and some of the largest nipples I’ve ever seen, some of which reminded me of the chocolates they leave on your pillow in posh hotels.

My mind was drifting at that point.

It’s bonkers. But sadly not funny bonkers, just tediously indulgently bonkers. It has no narrative climax, it’s peppered with characters who never appear and off-screen events we never see. Karsh drifts from woman to woman for no particular reason, and the characters speak to each other in strange stilted paragraphs. Presumably the C-Berg knows what he’s on about (something to do with mortality and jealousy) but whatever it was, it went way over my head. I imagine some will admire it as a sort of lukewarm body horror fever dream, while others might find its objectification of mutilated female bodies just a teensy-weensy bit offensive. I might have been offended if I hadn’t been trying to retain the will to live by contemplating the joys of hotel confectionery.

On the plus side, the cast should all get awards for looking as if they, at least, know what’s going on.

Verdict: Cronenberg has given me several very happy evenings in the cinema over the decades. Sadly The Shrouds wasn’t one of them, although I guess it did get me thinking about my own mortality and the two precious hours of life I was never going to get back. 2/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com