The Shrine (2010)

When The Shrine starts you find yourself in familiar land, so familiar in fact that you pretty much lower your expectations. Backpacking youth gone missing in small European country, journalist defying her editor to look into it to the point of lying just to get a scoop and meeting some pretty hostile locals. We've seen this about a million times before, havent we? Preparing yourself for a predictable ride you suddenly realize that The Shrine might actually be a bit more interesting than that. Yes, it is familiar but the story goes in a direction you arent expecting. No inbred Polish rednecks, no rich americans killing people for fun. Something that is cool and intriguing. You see, the village is close by a strange cloud close to the ground, filling the forest with a thick fog. A place you shouldnt visit. Which of course our heroes do.

And thank heavens for that. As soon as they step into the strangely dense and glowing fog, the movie goes from being a walking cliché to something quite novel. And entertaining.

I always write as little as possible about the story in a movie I review and The Shrine will be no exception. You need to know as little as possible about it to enjoy it more. What you do need to know is that Jon Knautz first movie after Jack Brooks: Monster slayer (which I thought was sorta fun, but a little lame) is excellent viewing, taking a tried out plot and twists it around a bit, mixing it with great visuals and atmosphere and adding some fine gore. It's no masterpiece, and the polish audience will hate it for the truly awful polish accents, but to the rest of us it is a finely crafted moodpiece well worth watching. And the dvdcover is awesome.

At the moment this is only available on Canadian dvd which makes sense since it is a canadian movie and I bought my copy from Amazon.ca. The site stated that the delivery would take 30-40 weeks(!) but it arrived after four days.