Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jennifer Harrington
Starring: Daisye Tutor, Emily Goss, Nicola Posener, Octavius J. Johnson, Stephanie
Simbari, Grant Rosenmeyer
America's largest union for the performing arts, SAG-AFTRA, recently made
the decision to allow "influencers" to join their ranks. For those who don't
know, an influencer is someone with a large social media following, who
usually makes a living advertising products to their followers in a manner
that suggests those products are simply an organic part of their daily
lives. Of course, it's all a performance, as SAG-AFTRA's decision suggests.
Look beyond the square frame of an Instagram post and you'll likely see
someone struggling to pay their rent, yet who has managed to convince their
followers that they're living an enviably glamorous life.
Director Jennifer Harrington expresses this duality with a simple
edit in the opening sequence of her new horror movie, Shook. A group of beauty influencers, including our protagonist Mia (Daisye Tutor) are assembled on a red carpet receiving awards, with seemingly hordes of
paparazzi snapping away. But when we cut to a wide shot we see that the
scene has been staged in the rather unglamorous surrounds of a disused
parking lot rather than some hip new venue.
As a two minute short, Shook would be effective in making its
point if it ended on that revelation. But there's another 85 minutes or so
left, in which the point is laboured and shoddily integrated into a social
media riff on When a Stranger Calls.
When one of her fellow influencers is murdered, Mia decides to shun the
party she was meant to attend and agrees to babysit her sister's dog Chico.
As an unnecessarily upsetting montage illustrates, some sicko is murdering
dogs in the vicinity, and Mia's sister, Nicole (Emily Goss), is
worried her prize pooch might be the next victim. Stricken with the same
fictional debilitating condition that claimed their mother, Nicole has
preyed on Mia's guilt for neglecting their mom in her dying days (she was
too busy influencing I guess). When Chico goes missing and Mia receives a series of increasingly creepy
phone calls from Kellan (Grant Rosenmayer), the weirdo who lives
across the street, so begins an evening of terror.
Shook has the spine of an intriguing idea, and it's
refreshing to see a female horror protagonist who bucks the "final girl"
trend of being a virginal goody two-shoes. Mia is, to put it mildly, a bit
of a bitch. She's unlikeable from the off, and so Harrington and Tutor have
set themselves a challenging task to get the viewer on Mia's side. It's
something they never quite pull off, largely because the more revelations
are presented to us, the more preposterous the whole scenario becomes. If
you start pondering the logistics of the many spinning plates Mia's
tormentor has set in motion, it just simply doesn't hold up - there's no way
one person could have pulled this off unaided!
There's a moment in the climax where Mia livestreams her fight back against
her attacker and we see a collage of faces watching from presumably around
the world. Despite the action they're witnessing, they all appear completely
disinterested. I assume it's meant to be a comment on how numb we've become
to on screen violence, whether real or staged, but instead it plays like a
reflection of how anyone watching Shook will be feeling by
that point. Thanks to unconvincing plotting and characters we couldn't care
less about, the movie loses our interest long before its climax.
