When The Shrouds premiered at film festivals last year, David Cronenberg described it as his most personal work — a deeply felt response to the death of his longtime wife, from cancer in 2017.

It's also the highest-grossing non-English film ever and the only one to cross the $1 billion threshold at the box office. And it may double that. So I went to check it out.

Yes, bad things are happening in 1977 in the city of Recife: political disappearances, murder in the streets, a thorough sense of “mischief,” as one early title card calls it.