Writers: Jon Knautz, Brendan Moore, Trevor Matthews
Director: Jon Knautz
Once you find it, they won’t let you leave
The Shrine begins with a rather violent human sacrifice. From there we cut to career obsessed journalist Carmen (Cindy Sampson) having a troubled relationship with her photographer boyfriend Marcus (Aaron Ashmore). Desperate for a career saving story she takes her intern and reluctant boyfriend to investigate reports of missing tourists in a remote Polish village.
Once they get to the village they discover a strange religious cult, a cloud of mist that never moves and an evil looking statue in the woods.
All totally standard stuff, after the first five minutes I was mentally writing the ending. And as the film progressed, things pretty much played out as expected.
Until the end. In the last act the story swerved and turned into something unexpectedly original and intelligent.
Which makes this a very difficult film to review. The first half is pretty tedious and full of sub-genre cliches such as the farmer gutting an animal. Very lazy writing? Or deliberate misdirection?
Much of the dialogue near the end is in Polish without subtitles where you have to work out what’s going on from context. This worked really well but it could come as a shock after the spoon-feeding of the first half. Then after the excellent finale we get an attempt at an explanation which is crass and ineffective. It feels like they bowed to a confused preview audience and felt they needed to at least say something; I’d rather they’d left things up in the air.
Some of this script variation could be the result of having three writers. But there’s only one director and his work is equally all over the place. There are some wonderfully creepy scenes, both subtle an overt. But there’s also some of the worst line crossing I can remember seeing in a professional film.
So The Shrine is a very mixed bag. I really liked what it was trying to do but it didn’t quite hit the target. Maybe it was just trying too hard and being too clever. Whatever the reason the end result is a near miss.