As if her freckled features hadn’t graced our screens enough of late, Julianne Moore is back. This time we get more of the Moore in a stony-faced ‘psychological’ thriller, emphasis on the ‘psychological’. Playing a shrink-cum-personal investigator (the kind of vague, post-Clarice Starling qualification which allows her to meddle far too often in other’s business) our ginger heroine is assigned a patient with multiple personalities, all of whom resemble Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Meyers’ Adam is a vulnerable, paraplegic hillbilly. Or is that a south African-accented gangster? Or the gravel-voiced leader of a heavy metal group?
It’s difficult to take a subject so unfashionable and un-PC seriously, with Meyers’ shaky grasp of accents detracting further from the poorly-realised ‘psychological’ theme. Any actor might relish the chance to play a man possessed, and it’s not that Meyers mangles his multiple roles completely. But the erstwhile Henry VIII is consistently patchy- poignant as the helpless victim, hilarious when he tries to be menacing- and this is never more apparent than when playing three different people in space of a single scene. He is simply too beefy and static a presence to be genuinely affecting, though this might also be blamed on a lazy script (‘My son died’. ‘Shit…’). Moore, meanwhile, retains a straight face and sphynx-like calm as the Tequila-quaffing heroine, whose long plaid skirt is meant to indicate Catholic guilt.
Shelter is visually polished and well-crafted, with a Hitchcockian, elegantly spiky soundtrack. But it suffers a crisis of identity halfway through; the film takes a schizophrenic turn for the worse, from tensely-paced, sub-Silence of the Lambs thriller to ropey supernatural horror. Is Shelter a highbrow psychological thriller masquerading as pulp, or a miscast piece of schlock suffering from delusions of grandeur? Either way, the ludicrous ‘Satanic’ twist and predictably gory finale are no compensation for two hours of misguided hokum.
Words: Roisin Kiberd
