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.
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.