The Shrine (2010)

• Year: 2010
• Released: 14 Oct 2010
• Country: Canada
• Adwords: 1 nomination
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1341710/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_shrine
• Metacritics:
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: English, Polish
• MPA Rating: Not Rated
• Genre: Horror
• Runtime: 85 min
• Writer: Jon Knautz, Brendan Moore, Trevor Matthews
• Director: Jon Knautz
• Cast: Aaron Ashmore, Cindy Sampson, Meghan Heffern
• Keywords: journalist, coffin, diary, village, supernatural, cult,

5.5/10

The Shrine Storyline

After a young American backpacker goes missing in Europe, a group of journalists link his disappearance to a remote village in Poland. They travel there hoping to get the story, but as they unravel the secrets behind this mysterious village, they are suddenly pursued by hostile locals. Unable to escape, they soon become the next victims of ritualistic human sacrifice. Forced into the gruesome reality of true survival horror, the journalists soon discover that this village hides a much darker secret than they could ever imagine.—Skid Gasket

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The Shrine Movie Reviews

A big fence and a warning sign or two: job done!

Investigative journalist Carmen (Cindy Sampson) travels to Kozki, Poland, with her photographer boyfriend Marcus (Aaron Ashmore) and intern Sara (Meghan Heffern) to try and find out what has happened to a missing American backpacker. There, they experience hostility from the locals, who are harbouring a terrible secret hidden by a strange fog in the middle of the woods.

At first it seems like The Shrine is simply another xenophobic horror, existing to perpetuate the myth that rural Eastern Europe is a backwards hellhole, and anyone from America foolish enough to pay a visit is destined to die a horrible death. In a rather neat twist at the end of the film, it transpires that the hostile locals are in fact the good guys (of a sort), desperately trying to prevent a terrible evil from possessing unwary travellers and escaping their village.

This neat, unexpected turnaround of events helps prevent the film from being a total disaster, but the fact is that, for much of the time, this is frustratingly routine stuff, the American characters predictably ignoring all warnings, doing their utmost to ensure that they wind up dead, and the Polish villagers acting in a threatening manner and carrying out grisly rituals, when all they really need to do is quarantine the area that is cursed (build a big wall or fence around the foggy part of the woods—problem solved).

What I learnt from The Shrine: all Polish 10-year-olds can confidently converse in English.

A fun alternative to the Horror norm

I wasn’t expecting much when I sat down to watch “The Shrine”. The premise looked all too familiar in a sea of excruciatingly bad horror titles. The opening scenes did little to quash my suspicions, however, I decided to stick it out and go for broke. I’m actually really glad I did.

There is very little contrived material here. The film sets up it’s story and moves forward convincingly. While some of the dialog tends to border on silliness, a rather strong cast is able to deliver it in a believable fashion, which, along with the top notch cinematography, sets “The Shrine” apart from it’s contemporaries. Yes, the Polish accents were brutal, as were the ceremonial robes, however the suspenseful scene direction more then makes up for it. It’s one of those films, where as, you don’t really care all that much about the characters, but you really dig what the film is doing with them. It’s easy entertainment, and sometimes that’s all it takes.

No, this is not a film that is destined for cult status or a franchise tag, but it is an enjoyable little horror film that reminds us of why we love this genre… Because it’s fun.

Better than average horror pic

Yes, the script is kinda cheesy. Yes, the actors are blandly pretty. Yes, the characters do annoyingly dumb things in the woods. But there are some pretty decent aspects to “The Shrine” that make it worth the 90-odd minutes out of your life time to watch it.

First of all, it’s not as entirely stupid as 99.9999% of horror movies currently in release. Early on there are some sequences which are, though derivative of J-horror, at least nicely scary. There’s a very well done mid-movie change up and an ending that actually doesn’t make you want to throw up your hands in disgust.

Faint praise, I know. But compared to the brain dead gore porn masquerading as horror films these days, this film’s attempt to generate some real scares seems almost revolutionary by comparison. “The Shrine” is, at the very least, a pretty fair port in a storm of Hollywood crap.