Director: Antonio Negret
Writer: Daniel Negret
Stars: Sara Canning, Alejandro Fajardo, Kuri Fuerez
Synopsis: A Missionary converting an Indigenous Community in a remote Ecuadorian volcano must come to terms with her own Faith when her son is possessed by dark forces.
Somewhere within Shaman there is a film that balances all of its ambitious swings. Theological disputes between cultures and the dangers of colonialism get overshadowed by a mediocre exorcism film. It’s a shame that the more interesting moral questions the film poses go relatively untapped, leaving them almost entirely to instead focus on cheap scares and underwhelming performances. What starts out as a visually eerie film that establishes an unease almost instantly quickly falls apart as its best moments fade into a disappointing mixture of run-of-the-mill horror jump scares.
Director Antonio Negret’s feature debut Shaman introduces audiences to two differing cultures: Catholic missionaries have entered an Indigenous community’s land to convert them. In fact, the film opens with Candice (Sara Cunning) witnessing a young woman converting while her son plays in a nearby field. There’s a sense of unease immediately, mostly due to how Candice doesn’t completely let her guard down while keeping tabs on her son. If her people were there to help, what threats could there possibly be to her son? Unbeknownst to her, her son Elliot (Jeff Klyne) finds himself wandering in a cave that locals told him was off-limits in pursuit of his missing ball. A once studious child who was well on his way to becoming a leader of his missionary group with his upcoming confirmation was now missing.
When Candice discovers her son is not under the safety of her roof she panics, it’s totally out of her son’s character to do this, and their final conversation is part of the reason he is missing in the first place. Eager to get her son found before his big day of being recognized by his church, she takes to the streets of their small community desperate for answers. All clues lead to Candice entering the same cave that Elliot was told not to enter, as she walks through the narrow walkway she finds her son. Elliot is knocked out cold, seemingly in a deep slumber being cared for by a shaman. Chaos quickly envelops their lives as, against the shaman’s wishes, she removes her son from his watchful eye. Elliot is now slowly falling into a demonic possession, which makes his mother go mad, blaming the people she once sought to convert for the ailments that have inflicted her son.
There’s a much more interesting story just below the surface of Shaman; unfortunately, writer Daniel Negret shifts the focus from the missionary work to a lackluster exorcist film. The theological differences between these two opposing cultures are neglected; Negret gives us small moments, mostly through Father Meyer (Alejandro Fajardo) and Candice when discussing the best way to treat her son. Candice believes her son’s illness was caused by these shamans, but her reasoning is never fully developed enough to feel like anything other than a prejudice against this other culture. The film focuses too much on the colonizers’ lives and their point of view that the indigenous community barely gets a characterization that isn’t directly connected to those who are invading their lives.
When Elliot becomes fully possessed, the film turns into a final act that seems like it comes from an entirely different film. As the tone shifts from eerie to over-the-top theatrics, this is where it lost my interest. This could be in part because director Negret is trying to balance more than he can for his first feature, but for all the cultural imagery from the Indigenous people that is used, we really don’t get much insight into who they are and what they believe. Showing the film from the white lead’s perspective doesn’t give the native culture much grace when Elliot falls ill. While it doesn’t feel that their culture is neglected purposefully, it does feel like those making the film were more interested in making an exorcism film than in exploring the horrors of colonialism.
What saves Shaman is the lead performance from Canning, who puts out a performance that is a contained paranoia. She’s a woman who is worried about her son, seeing him fall deeper and deeper into his sickness, and she refuses to do nothing. Even while her character is written as one-dimensional with her distrust of a foreign to her culture, Canning’s performance adds depth to moments that would fall flat with a lesser talent. She isn’t afraid to show deep emotions through her face alone; one moment that sticks out is in the beginning of the film as she goes from hopeful, as she gazes on a new member getting baptized, to unnerved, watching her son play in the distance. It also helps that this moment is a visual flex from cinematographer Daniel Andrade, who opens the film with a glowy idyllic view of their missionary community that quickly grows dark.
Ultimately, Shaman doesn’t say much worthwhile about religion, other than that each culture has its differences, but those differences are barely tapped into in a meaningful way. While the opening of the film could hook you, there’s not enough explored within the film’s more intriguing moments to reel you in.
