David Cronenberg is back, and he’d like to show you some corpses. Which is something new for Cronenberg. He’s spent a career showing bodies in various states of decomposition, growing new organs, being eaten by giant insects, muddling them up with cars and/or other modern tech. But dead bodies? This is something new. But at 82, it is perhaps unsurprising that Cronenberg is focusing on death in what, he’s suggested, will be his last movie (unless it isn’t).

His prior last movie, Crimes of the Future, from ’22, was written years before, and felt something like the Cronenberg of yore, with plenty of body horror, humans eating plastic, and secret cabals up to who knows what. The Shrouds is something different, with its focus on the dead rather than the living. In this case, Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has invented a techno-shroud in which to wrap dead bodies that sends out a disturbingly high-res video image of the corpses, allowing mourners to watch on screen their loved ones as they slowly decay. In this way, Karsh may keep an eye on his recently deceased wife, Becca (Diane Kruger, also seen alive, in visions (and as her still living sister)), while providing this needed (is it?) service to others around the world.

As a peculiar, Cronenbergian theme to explore, this would seem to hold promise. Here the memories of the dead are wholly corporeal; grieving, what Karsh misses is, literally, the physical presence of his wife. Watching her decay allows him to feel as though she’s not gone, not yet, not entirely. It’s a long, slow process, his letting go.

Yet that’s not what the movie is about. The shrouded corpses in their charming little cemeteries, and Karsh, there watching his wife, is the background. In the foreground we have a slight story about the Chinese wanting to use the shrouded corpses as some sort of spy network, effected through the implantation of mysterious techno-nodes on the bones of the buried. What, exactly, this spy network is meant to suggest is never explained. It’s only presented as being ominously evil, such that soon it won’t just be corpses acting as spies–it will be the living too! I think? It’s all pretty vague. This comes about via Karsh’s brother, Maury (a shaky, sweaty, creepy Guy Pearce), a classic Cronenberg character, the nerdy tech whiz who’s the key to the conspirators (think Max Ren’s assistant in Videodrome). The problem with this overlay of vague plot is that it causes one to ask–Well, and so what? So there’s some weird spies doing something weird with some corpses? And that means…what, exactly?

The Shrouds was originally conceived as a Netflix series, before Netflix remembered that they were Netflix, and that Cronenberg was Cronenberg, and scrapped it, instead blowing millions on that crap show you’re currently hate-watching. This TV series origin comes through in the movie. In a series opener, some vague notion of spies and a growing creepiness would play just fine. In a movie, with a beginning and an ending, not so much. Instead we’re left wanting either a real story of nefarious actors up to something terrifying (or at least revolting), or a deep dive into the world of rotting corpses. The Shrouds never quite commits to going down either road, not all the way. Which is too bad. Cronenberg was always at his best when he was at his most uncompromising, when he went all the way. What would all the way look like given this set-up? What would wating corpses decay potentially lead to? Cronenberg doesn’t take us far enough to find out.