THE SHRINE

Carmen and Sara are two journalists who, tired of dealing with minor cases, decide to investigate one on their own: the disappearance of a certain Eric Taylor, who never returned home after a trip. The two girls discover that the last place he visited was a mysterious village in Poland, and together with Marcus, Carmen's boyfriend, they set off to find him. The world of genre cinema is full of cursed and damned villages of all kinds, from the timeless one in "The Village" to the two-faced one in "Silent Hill," from the Lovecraftian town in "The Village of the Damned" to the grotesque and unsettling village in "The House with Laughing Windows." Here, however, we are in Poland, and the village in question strongly resembles the towns of the princess Xena or the Hercules series. Yes, because here we are presented with a film that, in its first part, introduces a situation and setting that immediately make you think of a terrible B-movie TV series from late-night programming, banal, stupid, poorly cared for, and poorly managed. From the start, the photography is uniquely flat, the sets are clearly pre-built, and the costumes look like the poorly made ones of cosplayers at a provincial comic book fair. This goes on for the first 40 minutes, during which we watch the journalists and one of their boyfriend's search for the missing boy, even though we, the audience, are shown his (ugly) end from the beginning. Fortunately, if we last until the discovery of the young man's corpse, the road to entertainment is all downhill from there. Of course, the photography, costumes, and sets are still the same, but the plot begins to take interesting and unexpected turns, and we start to be put in difficulty as to what to expect. Only at the end can we conclude that we have seen a rather banal film that nevertheless manages to entertain and surprise for a good half hour. There are no shortage of gruesome scenes, on which the film pushes quite hard, and we are not spared from corpses of children from which intestines spill out, severed feet, and hammer blows, all created with truly well-made homemade special effects. Similarly, homemade are the faces of the demons, which manage to be quite frightening and unsettling. A downside, however, is the tension scenes, for which, despite recognizing a laudable attempt at originality, in the end, excluding a couple of exceptions like the scene in the fog and a few others, do not frighten or involve as they should. The ending is also quite rushed and leaves some questions unanswered that appear more like superficial screenplay errors than intentionally omitted elements. Aaron Ashmore (long career in TV series including "Smallville") is the one who convinces the most in the cast despite his lack of expressiveness, while the two girls, played by Cindy Sampson (the series "Supernatural") and Megan Heffern ("Old Stock"), hover between anonymity and the irritating stereotype. Trevor Matthews (also executive producer) as the "guide" of the village is instead completely out of place. The director is Canadian Jon Knautz, already director of "Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer." In the end, "The Shrine" turns out to be a film definitely better than many of its "colleagues," especially for the last part, but it is still quite easily forgotten.