UK Release Date: 02-08-2010
Price: £17.99
UK Certificate: 15
Director: Mans Marlind, Bjorn Stein
Country: US
Distributor: Icon Home Entertainment

Although dealing with multiple personality disorder, Shelter is more of a bipolar experience, both as a film and for the audience. The first half of directors’ Mans Marlind and Bjorn Stein’s film sees the ever-excellent Julianne Moore (Far from Heaven, Children of Men) as forensic psychiatrist Dr Cara Jessup, asked by her doctor father to interview one of his patients. This is Adam (Jonathan Rhys Myers, The Tudors, From Paris With Love), who it soon transpires is host to more disturbing personae than the dodgy politicians mimicked by impressionist Rory Bremner. In a watchable first half, the sceptical Jessup is drawn increasingly into the labyrinth of Adam’s multiple personality disorder, a condition in which she does not scientifically believe, while anyone with a penchant for atheism who comes into contact with him develops a nasty, indeed terminal, rash.
 
Moore, togged up like a repressed librarian, all polo neck, woollen tights and drab tartan skirt, spends her life sat across the table from the unleashed extremes of the human psyche. She’s good enough to make you believe in a forensic psychiatrist who lost her husband to cutthroat violence at Christmas and who yet wears a crucifix, not quite willing to relinquish the last traces of her faith to verifiable data and devastating personal experience. And there’s more: as Cara delves deeper into Adam’s past it transpires that the personalities within him are murder victims.

Watching Rhys Meyers struggle manfully to stay just the right side of William Shatner histrionics, given the multiple characters he is called on to portray, is anxiety inducing enough; then the plot leads us implacably down subfusc corridors of the mind towards the revelation of the origins of Adam’s seeming psychosis, punctuated by a few unsettlingly dark atmospheric shifts. But at this point the film decides to go all Pentecostal mountain folk crackers on us: when Dr Jessup makes a leap of faith, it’s a leap too far for the audience, the narrative running around as incoherently as Julianne Moore is asked to do in a spooky midnight forest full of blind seers and taciturn backwoodsmen, presumably unsure if they’re supposed to be in Deliverance or The Hills Have Eyes.

Shelter is a film of two halves: the first a watchable thriller with supernatural overtones, the second preposterously OTT, and not in a good way. The irony of the film being helmed by two directors is an obvious one. Like I said: bipolar. The film’s manic ending makes a depressing conclusion to its promising beginning. All that you might be left wondering at the end is which director was responsible for which.