Just in time for Hallowe’en – erm, hang on that’s not right – we get a horror film that passes through the threshold of silly fun and on towards the outer frontiers of moronic garbage. Like a surprising number of these things, it stars the otherwise respectable Juliane Moore and is directed by a mysterious pair of super-cool Europeans. Beware.
Moore plays a recently widowed psychiatrist with a special interest in the dangerously deranged. Nothing has, however, prepared her for the peculiar case of Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ particularly terrifying case of split personality. In her first conversation with the cutesy, he jarringly oscillates from being an arrogant street kid to a feeble, shy country boy. Which is the delusion and which is the host?
Dr Moore decides to investigate the twin personalities and fast discovers something awfully scary: the patient seems to have summoned up the persona of a disabled boy who died over a decade earlier in a remote part of the country. Other weirdness manifests itself. Pictures of Rhys Meyers appear to indicate that his spine is, at times, perfectly normal and, at others, dangerously malformed. Meanwhile, various secondary characters begin to develop scarring and blistering on their own backs. There’s also some stuff about witches. What the heck is going on? Who is seeking Shelter from what?
You will, most likely, still be asking yourselves those questions after having seen the film. In the first 10 seconds, I came up with a solution that, though barmy, made 100 times more sense than the one on screen. When somebody makes my film, go and see it. This version offers only camp pleasures.