Monday, October 24, 2011

October Horror 2011: Day 24 - The Shrine


The Shrine is a 2010 Canadian horror movie directed by Jon Knautz and starring Aaron Ashmore.

The film opens with an unknown man dressed in a gown strapped to a cross-shaped table as a cloaked cult chants odd prayers in Polish, then hammer a grotesque mask into his face.  Cue credits.

Flash forward and we meet Carmen, a reporter who's in a failing relationship with Marcus, a photographer.  Carmen is in the professional doghouse for writing a controversial article.  In a misguided attempt to salvage both her career and relationship she suggests Marcus accompany her on a "vacation" to the Polish village of Alvania, and while he's their he can help her do a story on the original man's death.  The original man was a reporter for the same paper, incidentally.  They take along an intern named Sara.

When arriving they do a few uncomfortable "ha ha look at how weird and backwards these rural Polish hicks are" scenes before finally seeing an unnatural grey cloud above the forest, which was mentioned in the original reporter's notes.  They go to investigate and after being initially warned away from the forest, they sneak past the villagers and discover the cloud reaches the ground and forms a dense and visible wall.  Sara and Carmen enter the fog and are lost for a time.  When they come out, they find a little girl who speaks passable English to lead them to a barn containing several corpses, all wearing masks like the reporter in the beginning of the movie.

The group is captured by the cult, and separated.  I'm going to stop here since I don't want to give away anything interesting.  If you want the full synopsis, head to wikipedia, or go ahead and watch the movie.

The opening bit where the leads first enter the village are pretty uncomfortable, but not in a good way.  They're poorly handled and a little silly, even though it's obvious they're trying to be tense.  The scenes inside the fog itself are a pretty good warm up, and although a bit unsurprising are well executed.  After the discovery of the corpse barn the movie takes a very sharp turn into more grotesque and interesting territory.  There are very bizarre monster effects that function both as jump scares but also to blur the lines between what's happening and what might be happening.  Are they hallucinations, or some sort of "true" vision revealing real monsters?  This sort of thing only escalates until the movie more or less answers the question in a pretty novel way.  I wasn't surprised by it because they made it make sense that it was happening, but not so much that I saw it coming halfway through the movie.  I also really like the twist that the angry, scowling, knife-wielding Pollack isn't actually a bad guy.

One thing I didn't like was that a significant portion of the movie was in Polish, and had no subtitles.  It was still relatively easy to follow the action and the depth of what happened at the end really didn't need spoken words to appreciate, however I think it could've benefited from subtitling or just using English for at least a bit more of the dialog during the cult's scenes.  It could have added a lot of depth to the mythology and also made the movie more accessible to a wider audience.

The makeup effects are also very good, but you can tell they're really low budget which is a bit distracting, they could have benefited greatly from just a tiny bit more money in the makeup department.

All in all, it's very good and well worth checking out.  It is tense, creepy, and interesting.  Sometimes even downright jumpy scary, but it's not relying on that to freak you out, which is where it wins.

Onward! To Africa!  Tomorrow is Dominion: The Prequel to The Exorcist.

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