Review: Shelter

Julianne Moore stars as a psychologist who specialises in debunking cases of multiple personality disorder she claims doesn’t exist. Her shrink dad Jeffrey DeMunn calls her one day to arrange for her to meet with a disturbed young man, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. He supposedly suffers from the aforementioned disorder, and one of his personalities is even in a wheelchair! Moore believes it to be cheap theatrics and tries to prove so. Things get weird, though, when one of Meyers’ personalities appears to be that of a murdered man, and Meyers seems to know very intimate facts about him. And then other personalities emerge, ones that Moore herself is tied to. Frances Conroy turns up as the rather sad mother of a murdered young man.

 

I don’t think this 2010 film (also known as “6 Souls”) from directors Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein (“Underworld: Awakening”) and writer Michael Cooney (James Mangold’s highly underrated “Identity”) is so bad it deserved to remain unreleased in the US until 2013. However, I can still see why it has a bit of a poor reputation nonetheless, and might’ve left studios unsure of how to market it.

 

It feels like two films in one, and the second half is much worse than the first as it throws all kinds of weird and silly horror stuff that actually isn’t all that necessary. I love horror, but the film was working much better as a psychological thriller, even with a miscast Jonathan Rhys Meyers continually proving to be out of his depth in a very demanding part. As a troubled man with possible multiple personalities, he goes to all of the obvious places and reminds you of just how damn good Edward Norton is at this kind of character. Meyers just hasn’t got the chops for it at all. He certainly gets a chance to botch two different kinds of American accent, though, which is some kind of achievement. At one point you’d swear he was Irish.

 

After a slightly overwrought early scene at a bar, Julianne Moore proves very well-cast here, and character actor Jeffrey DeMunn walks off with the whole film as her dad, the film needed much more of him. I might even suggest that it’s his best performance to date Frances Conroy can really only really play one character, but she’s given basically that role here, and she’s actually spot-on. A little with her character tells a whole lot. Although a little shaky, it’s a well-shot film with nice, rather bleak and ominous scenery at times and good shot composition too.

 

There’s something here, but the psychological horror/serial killer stuff didn’t mesh with the plague/illness/curse stuff whatsoever, and it becomes very, very silly. Like any film with a mystery, you keep watching to see where it goes, but the longer it goes, the more you wish it’d turn back. It just doesn’t all come together into a workable film, and the bone-crunching FX whenever Meyers changes personalities are just dopey.

 

It’s got a helluva central idea, and it’s not awful, just misshapen and disappointing in the end. It’d certainly be better with a superior actor than Jonathan Rhys Meyers, but even Larry Olivier would struggle to make this one work.

 

Rating: C