Review: SHOOK

Social influencer Mia takes her turn against a glamour backdrop delivers a spiel as the instamodel before her wanders off to seek relief. Pulling back we see that what we assumed was a Hollywood occasion is a tiny lighted backdrop in a parking space beneath an inner city building. Well, we didn't know. It's a good joke as is the scene where we follow the model into the toilets and get a Demons 2 style payoff. If the rest is anywhere near as good as this we're in good hands.

Mia goes to the family home to house and dog sit the place while her sister is out of town. Their mother was nursed to her last by sis and you get the sense that her brief holiday in Frisco is a treat long in the coming. Mia sets in for the evening herself at home again, a prodigal daughter with a sense of burden. This isn't so bad as it's too easy keeping in touch with her followers and friends through her mobile. Then the calls begin. A guy from across the road who has just become a new follower rings and the calls get increasingly menacing until Mia finds herself playing choice games that mount towards the life and death of others.

While it's easy to point out lifts from the Scream prologue, He Knows You're Alone or Saw, or Phone Booth, Shook brings enough of itself to the table to warrant its own watch. The plot is mechanical but the genre is self-avowed and mercifully unironic. The extras I'm implying here don't lie in any intensification of the generic elements which it might have cheerfully followed to its own benefit. No, this is a story of identity and the darker things in the shadows that emerge when an identity rises to mass popularity. Mia is an influencer and so are her friends. All the rest are followers if they are not too young or too old to follow her. Quite early in the piece the better cousin is less Scream than Ingrid Goes West with its dark musings on remote identification and personal immersion into the fame of others. By pushing a high functioning thriller plot forward the comparisons between them end but the starting point is compelling. And, as genre films like this are fuelled on histrionics it's only pleasurable to see them here so pummellilngly delivered and to the last spoken line.

There is a noticeable lag in the transition from second to third act as big revelations don't quite conceal the repetition that starts feeling circular. If that's noticeable in an eighty-eight minute film you're in trouble. However, performances across the board from a cast of under-the-radar performers fill the tale and keep it going with a few lapses in some of the minor parts. It's Daisye Tutor (I really want to pronounce that as Daze-yeah!) who has to carry this one and pretty much does, showing a figure of power realising the limits of that power and suddenly subject to the kind of pressure the world puts on her followers (ok, ok, when I said "unironic" up there I was referring to the generic aspects, this movie doesn't wink at its audience about being a thriller). Though much of what she is meant to do on screen is be exasperated Tutor does give us a range within that and plenty of physical humour.

I picked this one last night as it's the first movie of the year with a 2021 release date. Hey, I thought, at eighty-eight minutes it'd be worth it for the date alone. Well, it was worth a lot more.

Seen on Shudder.