Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Michael Peterson
Starring: Mark O'Brien, Shaun Johnston, Jacqueline Byers, Josh Cruddas, Adrian Hough
1973's cinemagoers flocked to William Friedkin's The Exorcist because it was something they had never seen before. In the decades since however we've had so many movies in which priests, usually suffering a spiritual crisis, battle demons possessing innocents that it's all old hat at this point. It's no surprise that The Exorcist: Believer, the recent attempt to reboot the franchise that kicked it all off, flopped at the box office; audiences had seen it all before. Exorcism movies tend to follow the same tired formula: a brooding priest who is questioning whether he's fit to wear his frock has his faith restored by winning a battle between good and evil. And they all have the same overblown climax in which said priest flings holy water around while mumbling vaguely spooky Latin phrases. Yawn.
At least director Michael Peterson and writer Tim Cairo have tried to do something different with their Canadian exorcism movie Shadow of God. Their heroic priest, Father Mason (Mark O'Brien), isn't suffering from any crisis of faith; he's fully committed to serving the church. Peterson and Cairo also take the action out of the usual teenage girl's bedroom and onto the open plains of rural Canada. With evil infesting a small North American town, Shadow of God has more in common with HP Lovecraft than William Peter Blatty.
Father Mason returns to his hometown following an exorcism that resulted in the death of a fellow priest, one of six men of the Catholic cloth who perished while performing exorcisms on the same day. His childhood home has bad memories for Father Mason, who was raised in a sinister cult until it was broken up Waco-style by gun crazy cops who mowed down his father, Shaun (Angus Johnston). Staying in the home of fellow cult survivor Tanis (Jacqueline Byers) and resisting her attempts to test his vow of celibacy, Father Mason is shocked when the local sheriff arrives with Shaun, whom he found wandering on the side of the road. As Father Mason tries to figure out how his old man could have returned from the dead, it becomes clear that Shaun is possessed by an evil force. As if that wasn't enough for the priest to contend with, the cult's surviving leaders have returned to the town.
I've always been a fan of Lovecraftian horror movies in which sleepy small towns are overtaken by evil forces, with The Fog, The City of the Dead, The Beyond, Salem's Lot and Messiah of Evil being personal faves. As such, as soon as it became clear that Shadow of God was headed into this territory I began to rub my hands in glee. Unfortunately my hopes were quickly dashed by a film that completely fails to build any of the moody atmosphere that can be found in the movies I just mentioned. Shadow of God's narrative is too rushed, so much so that it practically jumps from its first to its third act, never allowing its story to breath and build up tension. The world-building is largely reduced to expositional dialogue, as characters talk about their troubled pasts. Some characters behave in laughable ways, like the sheriff who finds a dead man walking the roads of his town and immediately dumps him on his son without running any tests to determine his identity. Tanis initially seems like a feisty heroine, only to spend most of the movie chained up as she waits for our hunky priest hero to save her. And it all ends in the usual overblown climax, though this one takes more from Raiders of the Lost Ark than The Exorcist. We're never given a chance to really get to now Father Mason or Tanis, so it's difficult to care about their plight. Perhaps Shadow of God might have been more successful as a Salem's Lot-esque two-episode mini-series that would allow for fleshing out of its plot, its world and its people. The recent adaptation of Stephen King's vampire tale excised vast chunks of the book in order to accommodate a feature film's running time but Shadow of God was never a book to begin with, so why does it feel like it's thrown away entire chapters of its story?
Shadow of God is on Shudder from April 11th.
