Shadow of God

I recently watched the Canadian film 🇨🇦 Shadow of God (2025) on Shudder. The story follows a priest with extensive experience in exorcisms, whose next case hits close to home - he must perform an exorcism on his own father. As he confronts the entity inside his dad, he begins to wonder if he's facing God himself...

The film is directed by Michael Peterson (Knuckleball) and stars Mark O'Brien (Ready or Not), Jacqueline Byers (Prey for the Devil), Josh Cruddas (Polar), and Adrian Hough (There's Someone Inside Your House).

Shadow of God feels familiar - like a story you've seen before - but it still manages to hold your attention. The acting is excellent, and the dynamic between the priest and his father feels authentic. The setup is solid, and there's a shooting/execution scene that really grabbed my attention. Unfortunately, the exorcism scenes rely heavily on CGI, which felt awkward and ultimately broke the immersion for me.

In conclusion, Shadow of God had the ingredients for a strong film but falls apart when it strays from practical effects. I would score it a 4/10 and recommend skipping it.

When I sat down to watch the 2025 horror movie "Shadow of God", I initially just thought that this was another run-of-the-mill exorcism movie, as I had not heard about it, so I didn't know what I was in for. But with it being a horror movie that I hadn't already seen, of course I needed no persuasion to sit down and watch it, given my love of all things horror.

Writer Tim Cairo put together a fair enough script, which made for a watchable movie. But it was hardly an outstanding movie in terms of exorcism movies go. It was not a particularly scary or disturbing storyline, which ultimately made the movie have less of an impact on the viewer. The movie sort of loses its momentum and settles into a monotonous hum, from which it never recovers.

Of the entire cast ensemble, I was only familiar with Josh Cruddas. And the fact that it was all unfamiliar and new talents to me, was actually something that spoken in favor of the movie, as I enjoy watching new talents on the screen. The acting performances in "Shadow of God" were fair.

Visually then the movie was okay. I liked the cinematography throughout the course of the movie, as there were some nice visuals, angles and interesting shots.

My rating of director Michael Peterson's 2025 movie "Shadow of God" lands on a four out of ten stars.

A checklist of familiar tropes abound in this derivative exorcism horror which is weird as one of my 'go to' horror/fantasy movie websites -Culture Crypt gave this 85%.

Not sure if the reviewer was bribed or had a concussion since the cliches presented here are what he would usually rally against.

The deep hellish voice of the demon at the beginning is used countless times, add holy water, a troubled priest with a dark past, satanic cults. It's all just rehashed from other horrors.

It fact it's so forgettable I'm having difficulty remembering it now for this review.

Only the chilly,atmosphere of the Canadian wilderness left an impression on me.

Time for an exorcism rethink!

If you like Raiders of the Lost Ark, you're gonna love this movie. When the Ark, I mean sarcophagus, scene arrives and the light starts emanating from it, imagine John Williams' score from Raiders playing in your head. It'll be the only joy you'll experience from this looney tunes of a movie.

If next week you come across this movie, don't be surprised if you start watching it again because you couldn't remember you saw it a week ago. It's that memorable.

Also, for most of the movie after about the 1/2 hour mark, imagine you're watching a Monty Python episode. The movie will make waaaaay better sense.

After a failed exorcism, a priest returns to his hometown to reflect on his position only to find his thought-dead father returned to him, setting off a chain of events that point to a special entity running through the town and must rely on his spirituality and faith to save everyone he holds dear.

This was an overall decent if decidedly generic feature. Among the more enjoyable factors present here is the wholly intriguing setup that admittedly tries to do something clever and unique with the possession genre. Rather than go for the traditional route of a conflicted priest brought back to the side of righteousness due to a prolonged battle with a demonic entity that tries testing him in the body of a young girl, this one goes for more a small town corrupted by an evil entity and forcing him to deal with it. The backstory involving the cult's activities taking over the area only to be stopped by the authorities starting his quest with the church and using that as a basis for spreading the malicious activity in the present by allowing it to come off with the mindset of the figures coming back for revenge. That sets up some of the more intriguing, if ultimately problematic, work here, where the attempts to save the town manage to bring about some underwhelming work involving the attempts at exorcizing the demonic spirits within the victims. In concept, this work should be quite intriguing as it soon becomes obvious that there might not be demonic forces holding the spirit hostage but holy figures that are involved for different reasons than would initially be suspected. However, the film never goes through with this idea, as the idea is brought up early as the reasoning behind the father's return, yet it never does anything interesting with the idea other than doing something different for an exorcism scene beyond throwing dollops of holy water at a contorting woman yelling in demon-accented Latin. The visuals in the scenes look intriguing enough with the spectral lights and stuff going on, but it's more about how different these are than anything else. By the time it gets to the finale and the actual purpose of the exorcism is brought into play, this one ends up falling apart rather badly. The rushed nature and generally unprepared story make a big impression on this part of the film as the few bits given to the background of the main characters are generally uninteresting and not even pertinent to what's going on as there's a bizarre abduction and holding hostage aspect that doesn't make much sense why the figure in particular would be involved. That renders a lot of the race to save feel redundant and lacking in tension as there's no real stakes here with no information on what's going on, from the background of the characters to the purpose of the cult and what they're working towards with everything just given a surface-level gloss that never goes deeper into these aspects. The supernatural action and explosions are fun enough, but they're not nearly enough to save this one.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Graphic Language.