In The Shrouds, David Cronenberg’s infinite love for the human body is on par only with his love for his late wife, Carolyn. If there were any doubts the director is speaking of himself here, Vincent Cassel’s particularly Cronenbergian shock of white hair should dispel them.

As an obvious stand-in for the auteur, Cassel plays Karsh, a widower who’s “made a career out of bodies”. After his wife Becca’s (Diane Kruger) death, he’s violently torn between his genuine love of life and his desire to crawl into the woman he lost’s grave. But Karsh is no artist. He heads a particularly morbid start-up called GraveTech, whose state-of-the-art cemeteries place digital screens on every headstone that allow you to see the body beneath your feet. Technologically advanced shrouds replace coffins, and cameras record them from every angle.

On a first date, Karsh walks the woman (and the audience) through how it all works. He then reveals he used the technology on his wife’s final resting place. His date isn’t horrified, per se, but knows she could never, ever compete with a woman who doesn’t even need flesh to keep Karsh completely captivated.

Cronenberg lost his own wife to cancer, a trauma that often means witnessing the disintegration of the body in real-time. Karsh’s wife Becca’s illness, on the other hand, is stranger. Chunks of her go missing, and her bones crack with the slightest touch. Both are reminiscent of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s “A Portrait of Ross in L.A.” — the conceptual art piece that features a pile of brightly colored candy on the ground that disappears piece by piece. Gonzalez-Torres made it to commemorate his partner, who died of AIDS. Cronenberg’s version, of course, is less a rainbow of sweets and more a bleak, sinister bog.

For his part, Karsh doesn’t seem fully present in the world. Nonetheless, he’s going through the motions, hoping to reconnect again. It’s a kind of hopeful malaise. He isn’t himself, his grief rotting him from the inside out. Still, he wants to live some kind of happy existence again. Cassel knows exactly how to ride that line. His demeanor is reserved, with his eyes doing the heavy lifting, searching for some sort of meaning.

When vandals desecrate Karsh’s cemetery, the plot thickens into a sticky, technofuturistic noir. I suspect this is where Cronenberg will start to lose the audience, save for the superfans among us. The film’s only grounding force is Cronenberg’s very real grief. When he attempts to spin the story beyond that into something bigger, we start losing the shape of things.

Perhaps it’s because The Shrouds works best in the quiet abstract. I’d be happy to while away hours in Karsh’s memories of Becca. Kruger and Cassel have a strange and comfortable chemistry that makes it easy to believe they were soulmates. But as fun as it is to see Kruger playing three different parts (Becca’s sister Terry and the voice of a very Memoji-looking AI), not to mention Guy Pearce disappearing into yet another odd role, they feel more like distractions and half-formed thoughts than part of the point.

It isn’t that there’s a total lack of cohesiveness. It’s just harder to be interested in anything that doesn’t directly concern Karsh dealing with his grief. Again, we bless the superfans (myself included) because it’s so fascinating for a fan of the man to watch him work through his pain so publicly.

That’s why, imperfect though it may be, The Shrouds still feels like a gift. It’s not interested in the usual way we’re used to hearing this kind of story told. It’s still Cronenberg being his truest, most authentic self. Any director getting that freedom is rare. If you love his work, you can’t help but relish it a little, leaving the theater excited for whatever grabs his interest next, hopeful the experiment you witnessed helped him heal.

The Shrouds settles over the United States in select theatres on April 18 and blankets everywhere on April 25.

The Shrouds Trailer: