Audiences hungry for David Cronenberg’s infamous brand of body horror may have hoped that 2022’s Crimes of the Future marked his return to the genre. That film, which formed an unofficial trilogy that began with 1983’s Videodrome and continued in 1999’s eXistenZ, featured several callbacks to the Canadian director’s recurring visual and thematic interests.

The Shrouds, Cronenberg’s latest, is even less of a genre film than Crimes of the Future, though it does share its predecessor’s same dark sense of humour, as well as the director’s tendency to revisit or reconsider his previous work.

The film is ostensibly set in 2023, four years after the death of Karsh (Vincent Cassel)’s wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). Becca died of bone cancer and Karsh has yet to recover, as the opening scene of him crying during a visit to the dentist proves.

The introductory scenes also establish the...