Love and death: "The Shrouds"

David Cronenberg's second completed feature since the death in 2017 of Carolyn Zeifman, his wife of 38 years, The Shrouds is steered by a brace of questions asked early on by its upright, white-haired, naggingly familiar protagonist: "What do I do about the grief thing?" and "How dark are you willing to go?" In response to the first of these, Cronenberg has decided to make a film about grief. In response to the second, the filmmaker's answer is: pretty dark, though not nearly as dark as you may now be expecting. Vincent Cassel, dressed from top-to-toe in Saint Laurent black and piloting a self-driving Tesla that gradually assumes the air of a top-of-the-line coffin-on-wheels, plays Karsh Relikh, the recently widowed owner of a chichi restaurant overlooking a graveyard that becomes contested territory. The graveyard is significant to Karsh, because it contains the mortal remains of his late wife Becca (Diane Kruger); like the other graves, hers is watched over by a hi-tech headstone, accessed by an app, which allows the especially devoted mourner to observe a loved one's body decay in real-time 4K. "Of course, everything's encrypted," Karsh puns to the morbidly interested party with whom he's been set up on a blind date, not the last indication of how even at its most funny-peculiar, The Shrouds is oddly, potently funny-haha. At its blackest, some comedy; among the dead, a light scattering of dad gags.

The narrative that develops sees Cronenberg setting out his own stages of grief. There is mourning, of course: Cassel, at his craggiest, can't ever fully shake an air of ruefulness and regret at what's been lost. But there is also dawning obsession and paranoia - sending that blind date running for the hills - and a lapse into conspiratorial thinking after unknown parties trash the graveyard one night. (Here, Karsh's Judaism comes into play - and this feels like the first time the generally forensic Cronenberg has been compelled to dramatise his spiritual side.) For a while, the character resembles a more stylish analogue to The Conversation's Harry Caul, dwelling on and mulling over a videofeed that would seem to indicate someone wanted his wife in the ground, and possibly him, too. A diverse array of suspects is set before us: ecoterrorists who'd rather we cremated our bodies than connect them to the WiFi; a stragglehaired Hungarian CEO (Vieslav Krystyan) seen Photoshopped into pics with Bill Clinton; the Russians and Chinese, keen to exploit this technology for wider surveillance purposes; and the errant doctor who took Becca's virginity in her youth and wound up providing her end-of-life care. Yet everybody's mourning garb keeps being thrown off, in such a way you begin to wonder whether seize-the-day horniness is being prescribed as grief's ultimate expression. Karsh develops a growing intimacy with the CEO's wife (Sandrine Holt), a blind femme fatale who lets her hands do the talking, then with Becca's dog-grooming twin sister Terry (Kruger again), and then with his own Alexa-style digital assistant (voiced by Kruger). Grief assumes many forms, some more pleasurable than others; as a movie, The Shrouds gives the viewer a lot to work through.

Even by the ears-along-the-backbone standards of recent Cronenberg, the new film is very odd, perhaps even singularly so: it would be almost impossible to envision anybody else in world cinema coming up with this story, getting it greenlit, and then filming it in quite this way. Even as we walk in the shadow of the valley of the creative death predicted by artificial intelligence, here is proof of idiosyncratic imaginative life - and the kind of skilfully modulated weirdness Yorgos Lanthimos could only dream of. That weirdness permeates a flashback sex scene between Karsh and a mutilated Becca that is a) the latest mutation of the kink present in Videodrome and Crash, b) spared from terminal tawdriness by the depth of feeling directed into it (it's about the way we express ourselves physically even as our bodies start to fail us; weirdness upon weirdness, it's oddly moving) and c) possessed of what will almost certainly be the year's most sickening Foley effect. Elsewhere, however, Cronenberg's staging retains a crisp serenity: autumnal exteriors, illuminated by lots of magic-hour sunshine, interspersed with Japanese-styled interiors that connect the film to the elegant ideas about grief proposed in 1998's After Life and 2008's Departures while indicating Karsh has found ways of turning the space Becca left behind to his advantage. (It's grief as fusui, a simple matter of reorganisation.) It's never depressing; it's visibly a film made by someone who's made his peace with what's come to pass in his own life. It's still very talky, a plot that feels a constant need to explain itself, and its weakness as a thriller is that it's clangingly obvious who the weak link in the hero's entourage is going to be. (You could lay a winning bet as early as the opening credits.) Yet The Shrouds really is an example of a movie that is more than just the sum total of its plotting; its piquancy lies in the prevailing mood, several jolting images, and the intense hit of minimalist late-period style. One of the many matters you will come away thinking about: how David Cronenberg himself wants to be buried.

The Shrouds is now showing in selected cinemas.