Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Russell Owen
Starring: Tom Hughes, Kate Dickie, Gaia Weiss, Greta Scacchi
Along with the rom-com, horror is the genre that provides the greatest
amount of lead roles for women. As horror fans we like to pat our
favourite genre on the back for its progressive values, but in most
cases the reason for casting women as the protagonists tends to be based
on the regressive notion that an audience will fear more for the safety
of a woman than a man. It seems odd that we're still running with this
idea in 2021, because it's clearly nonsense. I think I speak for the
male sex when I say that if I were being chased by a masked, machete
wielding maniac I would be howling for my life and hitting notes as high
as any scream queen.
Writer/director Russell Owen gives us a rare horror movie with a
male lead in Shepherd. Devastated by the loss of his pregnant wife (Gaia Weiss) in a
fatal car accident, Eric Black (Tom Hughes) just wants to be left
alone with just his dog Baxter for company. He finds the perfect
opportunity for such solitude when he accepts a job as shepherd on a
remote island off the west coast of Britain, where he'll have no company
but that of Baxter and 600 sheep.
At least, that's what he thought. As is so often the case with
seemingly isolated locations in horror movies, it turns out Eric isn't
entirely alone here. He hears strange noises in the night and finds warm
cups of coffee stained with lipstick marks on his kitchen table. Could
Fisher (Kate Dickie), the sinister woman who ferried him to the
island, be trying to drive him mad for some odd reason? Or is something
more supernatural behind his torment?
Most of the film's scares come as the personal demons haunting Eric
begin to physically manifest themselves. Owen makes great use of his
windswept, fog-shrouded locale, with Eric spotting figures through the
fog that could either be spooks or tricks of the mind. Even if no
supernatural element was introduced to the film, the isolated setting is
scary enough with its levels of hardship (it looks bloody
freezing).
Hughes does a fine job of carrying the film. For most of the running
time he's left alone on screen with no other humans around and so it's
up to the actor to convey his increasingly distressed psychological
state without the aid of dialogue. Hughes convinces us that, as I
previously said, just because he's a grown adult male doesn't mean he
wouldn't be as terrified as anyone else when malevolent spirits start
popping up. With the introduction of Baxter I initially feared that Owen
might use the dog as a sounding board, allowing Eric something to
explain the plot to, ala Will Smith and his pooch in
I Am Legend. Commendably, Owen resists such a cheap storytelling shortcut. Instead
he dishes out plot development through visuals and the occasional
flashback.
Shepherd establishes Owen as someone who understands how
to craft a horror movie, but there's little here that fans of the genre
will find fresh or novel. At close to two hours the movie lags in parts.
But Owen's eye for a haunting visual (one particular image was genuinely
shocking) suggests he may be a filmmaker to keep an eye on, through
closed fingers of course.
