[Film Review] Shepherd (2021)

“Pregnant and lorn he left her by the sea.

Such guilt so heavy a punishment endures”

- Canto XVIII – Dante’s Inferno

The first seven minutes of this film tell you everything you need to know about the story. The funeral, the veiled figures, the mourning husband. A bodiless casket full of his lost love’s personal items. A baby’s hand surfaces from a kitchen drawer, leading the widower to a scan; she was pregnant.  Right off the mark, this is a film about grief. The question is does it aim to shock, spook, or downright terrify the sadness out of you? 

The answer seems to be none of the above. Shepherd leaves the audience with a bitter taste in their mouth, wondering whether they were ever meant to empathise with Tom Hughes’ character Eric in the first place. This is not to say that the small cast can’t hold their own; although I sincerely dislike Eric as a person, Tom Hughes’ performance as an isolated man is full of well-acted moments. The reason you grow to abhor Eric is  because he is a disrespectful man child who runs away to an empty island when his mother doesn’t give him sympathy over a marriage she disagreed with, and who can’t seem to openly express his feelings of grief without being forced into it by an old house and supernatural occurrences. 

Kate Dickie as Fisher, on the other hand, is a welcoming and eerie onscreen presence  . The half blind ferry-woman takes Eric across the sea to the underworld… or rather, The Isle of Mull, but more about the location later. Fisher’s ominous phone calls and supposed life teachings will keep the audience wondering if she is woman or demon, sworn to torment Eric as he tries to run from his past. 

The star of the film focuses on Baxter the dog who is  a very good boy and is the perfect tool for unnerving the audience. As those who live alone know, the worst thing your pet can do is stare fixated at an empty hallway or at a wall when there’s nothing there. Is it the animal sensing a paranormal presence wanting to cause you harm or have they merely seen a tiny bug that you haven’t spotted? 

As mentioned previously, some of Shepherd was filmed on the Isle of Mull, a gloriously beautiful Scottish island off the west coast. Clearly not filmed in peak summertime, this setting was ideal due to the grey skies, rolling fog along the hills, and the wide-open spaces that close the audience off from the rest of the world. I was reminded a few times of the moorland in The Woman in Black, which is also a film that holds isolation at the heart of the story. Another set piece that could be named as its own character is the house that Eric lives in on the island. This rotting carcass of a home, with its rickety stairs, unreliable faucets and damp walls scream haunted at the audience, a familiar set up for a slow burn film.

The most impressive aspect of Shepherd for me was the musical composition. The constant drone of the background felt like pressure on my ears, as though something could happen at any second. Every so often, you would notice that the music had stopped, a silence that clung heavy to the screen. A perfect example of this was a very innocent shot of sheep, the herd that Eric is watching over. But the deafening silence lingers, as the sheep’s eyes bore into your soul, and you feel someone has to say something soon to break the unsettling hush. 

Although the above points are ingredients for a classic atmospheric horror, the overall film did fall a little flat. I wasn’t particularly scared throughout the story (except for one instance on a certain ghost ship because of something in the background… I won’t spoil that though). I felt a little stressed and at times on edge, but this was often interrupted with one too many dreary depressing landscapes, or a long shot of Eric sitting in a corner brooding. The narrative itself wasn’t particularly imaginative. It has a lot of artistic suggestions without force feeding the audience, but there’s nothing in the story that makes it stand out from the crowd. As a fan of studies of grief in horror, I often compare such stories to The Babadook, a film that I personally believe is the perfect representation of someone suffering after a loss.

Overall Shepherd is a decent purgatory film about a man’s grief and guilt. At a healthy run time of just over an hour and 40 minutes, the story drags in some places but is saved by the overall chilling performances of its cast. The music and the settings are beautiful, the cinematography is elegant, it just falls a little short with the script after the wonderful opening few minutes, leaving the rest of the film to be about a moping man who has clearly done some bad things but is subconsciously blaming his wife who may or may not have slept around a little before her demise. 

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