6 Souls Reviews

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since it was starring Julianne Moore and since it was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, even if it was maybe not the worst movie I have seen with Julianne Moore, it wasn’t far from it, I’m afraid. Basically, it started out with a mental patient with a multiple personalities disorder but, like so many other thrillers or horror films, instead of developing a realistic and rational portrait of such a disease, they went paranormal which is such a lame and predictable approach. In fact, in this case, it was actually even worse as they went for some religious mumbo-jumbo which became increasingly non-sensical. For example, how did Sammy, the little girl, get sick? Indeed, she was never in direct contact with David/Adam/Wesley/Whatever. If this curse could work somehow remotely, what happened to all the atheists living in this city or even in this country? Shouldn’t they get sick as well then and die? Towards the end, there was a flashback supposedly explaining what actually happened to Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s character but, even though I saw this movie only yesterday, I don’t think I would be able to explain how it all actually went down. The fact that I stopped caring about what was going on for at least 30 mins before this flashback probably didn’t help. Concerning Rhys Meyers, I can understand the appeal for him to play a character with multiple personalities but I’m afraid he didn’t have the acting chops to pull this off. By the way, the whole thing turned out to be pretty rough for the main character played by Julianne Moore as she started as a window and, as the movie ended, her whole family was pretty much wiped out (indeed, her father, daughter and brother all died before the end-credits). Anyway, to conclude, the whole thing was just pretty bad and you should probably avoid it. 

I always like the films that try to explore the human mind. I surely have the hots for the Psychological thrillers. But the problem with such films is that they often operate on such a risky / absurd storyline that some where down the line we get to see a pretty bogus thriller instead of an exciting one. Shelter starts on a promising note and grows on me till the interval but then all of a sudden it decides to become a religion based thriller and throws out all the logics there after.
As I have already mentioned that Shelter do start on a very interesting note. Cara Harding is a Criminal Psychologist who is literally on a mission to deny Psychological excuses for any crime what so ever. In a turn of event she comes across a young man named David who happens to have 4 Multiple personalities in him and all of them being murder victims. She on the process of curing him or rather proving his identities wrong, starts digging dip before coming up with some serious dirt.

Till this point the story really takes itself seriously. But then all of a Sudden the Mystery story sacrifices all sanctity and becomes a Super Natural Religious thriller which really sucks. What really is more disappointing is that whatever suspense the story creates in the first half is given away with some petty Vodooish explanation.
The film scores some decent points on the acting department from the leading stars but the direction falls apart for more than once. Some scenes are spooky all right but once we figure out the reason the scare factor largely becomes dependent on the gimmicks.
All in all Shelter is not a bad film at all rather it's a wasted opportunity to create something worthwhile.
I am going 6 out of 10 for Shelter, it could have been much better had the makers shown better conviction.