Reviewenstein

This is a hard one to review. My mission in life - and by life I mean IMBD reviews - is to warn people when a horror movie they're about to watch is a clumsy metaphor for a social issue. If filmmakers are going to keep doing it, and they clearly are (looking at you, Soderbergh), somebody's got to give the heads up to innocent viewers so they can know ahead of time rather than finding out after an hour and a Prime Video payment. Usually it's easy because most contemporary filmmakers are really bad at metaphor. Their total literalism (which is putting it kindly - I didn't say "lack of skill and imagination") means they only seem to be able to make the story work on one level or the other: they can either make a movie about society or they can make a movie about a ghost. A good metaphor has to do both; you have to have a message and a satisfying narrative that reflect each other. Inevitably, these creators back themselves into a corner and have to pick one, and since they only made the movie to convey the message, the story always loses and the final act is an incoherent mess with a spotlight pointed directly at what was supposed to be subtext. The story falls apart, but the message is clear and overt. This movie... well, that's true of it, too, but it's so much better than most of its peers that it deserves recognition for it.

Usually when one of these movies hides the message until near the end I complain about it as a sleazy bait-and-switch. And again, this one did do that to a degree, and that's why I can't give it the ten stars I'd like to, but also again, it was too well done to describe that way.

First, this movie does an exceptional job of creating characters. From start to finish, every character you meet feels like a real person in a way I haven't seen in maybe decades. I can't praise it enough, honestly... it's like when you've had a head cold for a month, then suddenly your senses clear and you can hear and smell in a way you'd forgotten, and the world is a richer place than it was a minute ago. Watching this movie makes every character you've seen in the last twenty years look like a rough sketch on thin paper. It's crazy. This is the usual horror movie cast of teens and twentysomethings plus a few adults, and they do the same annoying things those characters always do: they get drunk, they flirt, they make bad decisions, they go to loud parties and stumble into the woods, but instead of being infuriating, they're all likeable somehow. No one is a caricature, no one is a stereotype - and I'm comparing this to serious drama, not just b-horror. This outclasses every character in the most hyper-sincere, emotionally-charged prestige picture in recent memory. These people are bloody Shakespearean. Infinite praise to the writing, the direction, and the cast. The characters of Ryan, Mariel, and Jason are particularly impressive, which probably shouldn't be a surprise since they're the protagonists, but the depth and realism of their relationships and the portrayal of their feelings for each other, not cloying or aloof, but supportive and flawed is worth calling out. So there's that.

The horror story itself is good. Very good, even. And unlike a lot of Metaphor Movies, it holds together right up to the end. The story is never fully sacrificed for the message. Oh, the metaphor here is trauma, by the way, like it almost always is. In this case it's the spectre of suicide and the shadow it casts over a family.

The alarm bells that the whole thing might be a metaphor start to ring about halfway through, when you realize the movie is spending a LOT of time on the characters' emotional and daily lives and relatively little developing the story. The story is still simmering in the background, but for every five minutes spent on the ghostly mystery there are twenty spent on how the characters are feeling and reacting to more mundane matters. The only reason for that, it may then occur to you, would be if the feelings were the important part and the ghost is secondary. If that's the case... well, there's only one place it can be going.

Ultimately the movie only has two real flaws as far as I'm concerned. First and most significantly is that imbalance between the emotional content and the plot; there's just too much of one and too little of the other. Second is the ending, which, like all its Metaphor Movie peers, drops the story in favor of the message, BUT it does in a way that doesn't *break* the story. It still works, you just don't get any resolution. That's not a terrible thing, though; lots of great movies have ambiguous endings. Is it a bait-and-switch? Maybe a little, and the result is an ending that will satisfy the audience that was watching for the message more than the one watching for the plot, but neither side of the theater will be left completely hanging.

Oh, and since all of my reviews address modern movies' approach to social issues and messaging, I guess I should include it here. It's pretty darn good on that score. Honestly, I should be praising it to the heavens for its treatment of male characters as human. The story focuses on three brothers, which is rare in itself, but even more unusually it takes their emotions seriously, acknowledges that all people are affected by trauma, is willing to show them crying, terrified, and in pain, as well as angry and closed off. The only drawback for me is it also leans a little too hard into the depiction of men as handling their emotions by bottling them up and violently lashing out, which, while certainly a real phenomenon, is not specific to men and is a stereotype I dislike. Then again, there genuinely are people out there for whom that behavior is normal, and they watch movies, too. Anything else on this side of things? Eh... Mariel makes a few casually abusive jokes, but they do come off as jokes and don't seem to reflect anything except a little of the last few years' cultural norms.

Also, can I call attention to how great a job Michael Boatman always does? Why do we not see Michael Boatman in more stuff? Good to see you, Michael, you rock.

Here endeth my review of The Shade. Head and shoulders above its peers, with maybe a little bit of dandruff.