Mark Reviews Movies: SHEPHERD

Shepherd, Saban Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 5, 2022

The mystery at the center of Shepherd isn't much of one, and apparently aware of that, writer/director Russell Owen makes just about everything else in this story a mystery, too. By the end, we know at least one answer about the main character and what he has done, but as for the rest of the movie's assorted puzzles, Owen leaves those intentionally or inadvertently unsolved. Either way, it leaves us too much in the dark.

The core of this tale is sound—filled with anguish and grief and, perhaps, something more disturbing. The central figure is Eric Black (Tom Hughes), a recent widower whose pregnant wife (played by Gaia Weiss in dreams and flashbacks) died in a car accident. There's no body for her funeral and burial, and there's a haunting shot at the beginning of the inside of a casket, empty except for a framed photograph and various trinkets that prove this woman existed.

Eric's own existence is now defined by waking mourning and sleeping nightmares of the lid of the coffin shaking, the hand of a baby reaching from out of the drawer where the photo of an ultrasound is kept out of sight, and the view from inside a car on a rainy road on the side of a cliff. Owen fills in all of the blanks—well, most of them, because there is that mystery, after all—of Eric's all-encompassing grief in these small, haunting images and sequences, and even as the story starts to care more about the atmosphere and strange goings-on surrounding the character, Hughes' performance serves as a sturdy, stoic presence of pain, melancholy, and an underlying anger that, at first, seems to mean one thing—although the possibilities expand as we learn more about him and the dead wife.

What we quickly learn about Eric is that he can no longer take this lonely, empty life. He has a loyal and adoring dog, but there's nothing else for him. He can't bring himself to go to work, and when he tries to reconcile with his mother (played by Greta Scacchi), the only member of his family who remains alive wants nothing to do with him. In her view, the son left her, as well as his sickly and now dead father, to be with his wife, and even with her drinking and affairs, that woman remained more important to Eric than his own mother. In other words, that option is out of the picture.

Soon, though, a newspaper ad promises a new job and a new start. It offers a job herding goats on a remote, quiet, and mostly barren island off the coast of Scotland. On the brink of suicide, Eric decides to take the job instead.

The rest of this tale amounts to a lot of atmosphere, plenty of strange sounds and visions, and a mounting sense that, somewhere beneath all of the grim tone and cryptic happenings on the island, answers are waiting to surface. We get the atmosphere and strangeness, at least.

The island is an eerie and foreboding place, with its lone cottage—dilapidated and lit only by gas lanterns—and an unused lighthouse—rising toward the sky with menacing metallic points jutting out at the top—and stark landscape—the green of the fields and the rolling hills seems to have faded from memory. There's little denying that Owen and cinematographer Richard Stoddard create a mood of enveloping dread and underlying malice in this place, but with that set, the story falls into a pattern of routine and impenetrable secrecy.

The routine, of course, is in those nightmares and waking visions of terror. Some of it comes from his grief, in seeing his wife's happier existence suddenly end with a POV shot of her final moments, and his troubled relationship with his mother, who shows up to wash dishes and a knife with her bare hands (The latter cleaning, of course, doesn't turn out well). Some of it comes from the unknown, such as what's happening inside the lighthouse, and a mysterious figure, cloaked and carrying a lantern, who, in the estimation of a previous inhabitant of the cottage, is a witch. On occasion, an enigmatic fisher (played by Kate Dickie), who brought Eric to the island on her boat, calls the otherwise dead phone in the cottage, offering all sorts of riddles about where Eric is, what he has done, and what he needs to do to understand his situation or come to terms with the consequences of his past.

There's an obvious answer to at least the main question here, which involves the wife's death, and to Owen's credit, the filmmaker doesn't precisely end up at that conclusion (It's close enough, though, if a bit unintentionally amusing in the exact specifics). For the most part, though, the plotting of Shepherd, founded upon creepy moments and unclear mythology, feels like an extended delaying tactic. With the movie's central mystery out of the way, the movie delays itself into far too many unanswered questions and questionable answers.

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