Shadow of God

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.

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.

I think Mark O'Brien is an excellent actor , and also a great writer and director having seen his film The Righteous. So I have no idea why he is starring in this. This movie is so far beneath his talents it's embarrassing to see him struggling in it, in fact the only reason I'm giving this 2 stars instead of the 1 it deserves is that at least he was trying to save this mess. This film has no redeeming qualities, it looks awful, the special effects are amateur hour, the writing was terrible, it's poorly directed , the entire production looks cheap. To top it all off I have no idea what was going on. Even thrillers and horror films should have a foot in at least a little bit of reality but this makes no sense and is preposterous. It's as if the writer tried to create something profound, gave up, and just wrote anything that popped into his head. Even worse someone decided to film it. A truly awful film.

I felt like this was an average possession movie but it had some good moments. The opening scene is great and grabs your attention but quickly gets boring for about 45 minutes. The small town plot should have got fleshed out more, specifically the cult part. The exorcist returning to that area is the most interesting part of the story but you have to get through a large chunk of nothing before hand. Special effects are decent and it's something different in a saturated subgenre. If you like possession movies you should check it out and give it a chance. Just for me personally by the ending I stopped caring and was ready for it to be over.

There are many harsh reviews on here, so I felt compelled to write one of my own.

Yes, the special effects aren't great for 2025, it's a pretty low budget film. But they didn't ruin the film for me personally.

I enjoyed it, the plot is a nice twist on standard possession films, a subgenre I like. It's much better than many shudder films I've seen. The acting is pretty decent, the characters are believable and there aren't too many times that the plot doesn't make sense, despite what other reviews say.

Probably worth a 6/10 really, but I added a star to balance out the crazy 2/10 ratings. Worth a watch!