Death Be Not Shroud: Cronenberg Hits Dead Ends in Sluggish Mystery

The burial business serves as the battle ground for a complicated conundrum in David Cronenberg’s latest, The Shrouds, a glum examination marrying death and technology. Once again, Cronenberg’s central protagonist navigates a ruinous obsession with bodies, but this time the horror deals with the last stop on life’s night train. Vincent Cassel, who reunites with the director after a memorable supporting role in 2007’s Eastern Promises, is a man so preoccupied with his late wife’s body he’s developed a technology which allows loved ones to peek into the coffin indefinitely, to witness the decomposition of the body via a monitor built into headstones operated by apps on their cell phones.…...