Despite some solid horrific imagery and a good lead performance, Shepherd is let down by janky storytelling.
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Psychological horror is a harder genre to master than you might expect. Mostly because of the barometer for success. While a slasher can impact its audience with some gruesome kills, a fun spin on the genre, or perhaps a standout performance from one of the leads, psychological horror's benchmark is...vibes. You have to properly capture someone's fragile headspace so that the audience's experience and our lead character's experience are almost identical. Maybe they have more information than we do, but generally speaking, we're along for the same ride. I bring all of this up because Shepherd does almost everything...except the vibe.
The Setup
The movie centers around recent widower Eric Black, who is haunted by images of his deceased wife. Hoping that some time away from painful memories and unhelpful family will do the trick, Eric decides to become a shepherd on a small Scottish island. Much to Eric's chagrin, the island doesn't appear to be helping his madness, it's exacerbating it.
Shepherd feels like a movie that has the outline of a psychological horror movie down, without the details of what makes it work.
For instance, setting your movie on an isolated Scottish island is a pretty solid idea. Making the mental isolation of our lead character both figurative and literal, where the only beings he can communicate with are sheep and his border collie. That's a good first step.
But that also means that every time you bring in another human or figure, we can say, with almost complete certainty, that this is a figament of Eric's imagination. Which is NOT ideal in a genre that likes to play with the fabric of reality. Instead it just offers up questions about "what's going on in this guy's head that this person is showing up?"
It's too obvious in a genre that loves ambiguity.
That doesn't have to be a dealbreaker though. If you're approaching this entire experience and story like a metaphor or as a penance/punishment for our lead character then we can spend our time digging into our lead character's psyche and piece together why this guy is going through this.
That doesn't have to be a dealbreaker though. If you're approaching this entire experience and story like a metaphor or as a penance/punishment for our lead character then we can spend our time digging into our lead character's psyche and piece together why this guy is going through this.
The problem is that the movie seems to be stuck in that initial setting where we're still playing with reality and wondering what Eric sees is actually real, when the twist that it's not has essentially been revealed in the movie's first third.
It means that there are these extended sequences where Eric is wading through horrific images that are clearly in his head, that are begging for additional context the movie hasn't given yet, that also don't appear to relate to his mental hang-ups, his failures, and whatever secrets he may be harboring.
And because of this disconnect, the vibe a movie like this needs to succeed doesn't hit.
I think it would be very easy to enjoy individual moments or images from this movie. As Eric's mental well-being takes a swan dive into madness, writer/director Russell Owen starts to piece together some truly evocative scenes that would have far more impact if they had been telegraphed at all before appearing towards the end.
The Verdict: Doesn't Hit the Vibe
Despite some solid horrific imagery and a good lead performance, Shepherd is let down by janky storytelling. 4/10
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