Review: 'The Shrouds' shows director David Cronenberg taking his body-horror game into some darkly humorous areas

There’s cool and there’s cold, and the always-cool director David Cronenberg veers too far into iceberg territory in his latest body-horror exploration of self-torturing humanity, “The Shrouds.”

Karsh, played by Vincent Cassel, is an inventor whose most recent creation was inspired by his grief at losing his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), to a brutal illness. The invention, called a “shroud,” is wrapped around a corpse at burial, and provides loved ones a real-time 3-D video image of the deceased as they decompose in the ground. Cronenberg, who wrote and directed, creates some early dark comedy by having Karsh explain all this to a blind date (Jennifer Dale) in a restaurant that’s attached to the cemetery where Becca is laid to rest.

Karsh’s obsession with Becca’s slowly rotting body, and the technology he’s created to witness that process, is starting to wear on his brain and soul. He takes on an enigmatic client, Karoly Szabo (Vieslav Krystyan), who he sees only through video messages — getting his orders from Karoly’s beautiful wife, Soo-Min (Sandrine Holt). Karsh also deals with the growing paranoia of his engineer, Maury (Guy Pearce), and his latent feelings for Maury’s ex-wife, Terry, who’s also Becca’s sister (and also played by Kruger).

Cronenberg’s eye for luxurious detail is unparalleled, and he uses it here to surround Karsh with a well-appointed house that isolates him further from humanity. That isolation takes its toll, as Karsh has trouble distinguishing between dreams and memories, particularly as he recalls the progression of Becca’s eventually fatal illness.

Cronenberg’s penchant for pushing body horror from the disturbing to the surreal is still strong — though he seems to understand that Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” has hit the outer barrier of gross-out gore, so Cronenberg has to find a new direction to make his statement. The path he’s chosen in “The Shrouds” and “Crimes of the Future” before it, of detached dark humor, is promising but doesn’t deliver enough here.

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‘The Shrouds’

★★★

Opens Friday, April 25, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language and some violent content. Running time: 120 minutes.