The Medium
Streaming on Netflix.
The Movie
The Shrine starts
off with a bang - that of a sledghammer slamming down on a metal mask - as an
apparent cult really does a number on a young guy, strapping him to a table
before the hammer comes down, the metal mask over his face.
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| That mask really does go with every outfit, though. |
After that, we're introduced to Carmen (Cindy Sampson), the
kind of journalist that ignores her bosses orders to stop investigating a story
- and ignores her boyfriend, Marcus (Aaron Ashmore), as well. To be fair, it
does seem like her story is worth pursuing - a number of tourists have gone
missing in Poland over the years, and she has a line on the family of a recent
disappearance - this is Eric, the young man from the opening scene. As her
boyfriend is a photographer, she manages to convince him to come to Poland with
her and her assistant, Sara (Meghan Heffern) to shoot pictures for her eventual
story. Assuming she's not summarily fired for doing the trip behind her
editor's back.
During a good chunk of the start of this movie - hell, maybe
the whole first half - I was not really impressed. It's got some mood, one good
jump scare and a couple of good actors - I always like Aaron Ashmore - but it
feels thin and almost cheap, like a SyFy picture. The lead, Sampson, is just
okay in her role and she plays Carmen with an almost flat affect that makes
everyone else around her seem to be over-emoting. It feels like she (and to a
lesser extent, Heffern) is playing a character in a monster movie and the
others - Ashmore in particular - play their characters like they're in a drama.
Carmen is constantly going places, saying things and doing things that only
make sense in a monster movie. Ashmore's character is like a normal person,
constantly saying things like "We should leave." and "That's not
a good idea."
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| Get used to that expression, you'll see it a lot. |
He's right of course, it's not a good idea. None of it.
Directed to the small town of Alvania (which sounds like a
location in a GI Joe cartoon) by Eric's journal they find the place to be a bit
time-lost, with dirt roads, open fields and a lot of distrustful town folk. Near
a small church with a strange symbol they see a weird, stationary cloud
hovering over the forest. It's mentioned in Eric's journal, so they head that
way, but are stopped by a group of villagers with pitchforks. Well, I think one
of them had a pitchfork. Might have been a rake. You get the idea. The leader,
a guy named Henryk (seen earlier butchering a hog) mistakes them for 'English'
and demands they leave.
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| The guys in the back did NOT get the Ren Fair dress code note. |
Marcus is only too happy to oblige, but Carmen has other
ideas. She's not leaving without finding out what happened to Eric. They park
the car and head overland through the woods before coming across a wall of
dense fog that seems to be just sitting there, not moving, not dissipating.
While Marcus and Carmen argue about what to do, Sara enters the fog and quickly
disappears from sight. After some time goes by, Carmen enters the fog after
her.
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| And Marcus stays back, as the only sane one. |
This is the point at which things start to turn around in the
film for me. Up until this point I've only been vaguely interested and neither
the characters nor their interpersonal drama have done anything to deepen that
interest. The town and it's folk are weird, yeah, but it could be any of a
hundred 'villages with a secret' in a hundred different horror movies.
Ah, but you see, the secret they're hiding is, of course, in
the fog. And once Carmen has found it, it's really too late for them all to
leave.
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| I said no pictures! |
The events of the film after that completely won me over. It
went from a film I didn't really like much to a film I was happy to be
watching. It kept me guessing longer than it probably should have, but I'd been
lulled into thinking it was one kind of film before it switched gears and went
a bit crazy on me. Nothing in the first half of the film really prepares you
for how violent and weird things get - so this is me, preparing you. It gets
weird and violent.
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| And also voilent and weird. |
There is an extended sequence of what I consider torture,
about two thirds of the way through the film. A character is subjected to the
same sort of thing that the initial scene showed, but it's drawn out and
extremely tough to watch. I could have done with this being a lot shorter - you
get the idea pretty quick - but on the other hand it serves to set your mind in
a certain direction, so I get why they did it - I just don't like it much.
The Bottom Line
The Shrine is a movie
that overcomes a pretty stale premise and a very slow first half to become
something really worth watching. It's not fine cinema and you may end up feeling
like you should have seen certain things coming, but it still leaves you
feeling like you watched a decent horror movie. And given how I felt when it
started, that's a pretty big accomplishment.
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