BURIAL PLOTS

"The Shrouds."

- BY JUSTIN CHANG

David Cronenberg’s new film, “The Shrouds,” contains the funniest and saddest blind-date sequence I've ever seen. Myrna (Jennifer Dale), a divorcée, is lunching with a widowed entrepreneur, Karsh (Vincent Cassel), who made his fortune as “a producer of industrial videos.” But Karsh has since moved on to other endeavors. For one, he owns the restaurant they're in; it’s located in a cemetery, which he also partly owns. His wife, Rebecca (Diane Kruger), who died of cancer four years earlier, is buried right outside. Oh, and, before she was laid to rest, she was wrapped ina metallic shroud with a built-in high-resolution MRI-like scanner, allowing Karsh to monitor her decomposing remains via a digital app he devised, called GraveTech. (Why the app isn't named A Tomb with a View is one of the story’s more perplexing mysteries.) Pulling up a feed of Rebecca’s body on his phone—or on her headstone, which has a built-in video screen—Karsh can observe the gradual discoloration of her bones and zoom in on her now hairless skull. Most grieving loved ones would be repulsed by such imagery; Karsh finds it comforting. “I can see what's happening to her,” he marvels. “I'm in the grave with her.”