Inspired by the loss of the director's wife, 'The Shrouds' is a grief story as only David Cronenberg would ever think to shoot one: Sardonic, unsentimental, and often so cadaverously stiff that the film itself appears to be suffering from rigor mortis, as if its images died at some point along their brief journey from the projector to the screen.
A quintessentially late film from an artist who's always been ahead of his time, 'The Shrouds' is Cronenberg at his most inhospitable; so far as the project's emotional availability and commercial appeal are concerned, it makes 'Crimes of the Future' seem like 'Barbie' by comparison.
Between its paranoid scramble of a plot and a protagonist who becomes increasingly difficult to see as anything more than an avatar for its auteur, 'The Shrouds' lends itself to a sort of delayed appreciation; its story only makes sense with the detached perspective that might begin to develop in the time between the death of a loved one and the funeral service at which they're laid to rest.
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