The Shade

This is a hard one to review. My mission in life - and by life I mean IMBD reviews - is to warn people when a horror movie they're about to watch is a clumsy metaphor for a social issue. If filmmakers are going to keep doing it, and they clearly are (looking at you, Soderbergh), somebody's got to give the heads up to innocent viewers so they can know ahead of time rather than finding out after an hour and a Prime Video payment. Usually it's easy because most contemporary filmmakers are really bad at metaphor. Their total literalism (which is putting it kindly - I didn't say "lack of skill and imagination") means they only seem to be able to make the story work on one level or the other: they can either make a movie about society or they can make a movie about a ghost. A good metaphor has to do both; you have to have a message and a satisfying narrative that reflect each other. Inevitably, these creators back themselves into a corner and have to pick one, and since they only made the movie to convey the message, the story always loses and the final act is an incoherent mess with a spotlight pointed directly at what was supposed to be subtext. The story falls apart, but the message is clear and overt. This movie... well, that's true of it, too, but it's so much better than most of its peers that it deserves recognition for it.

Usually when one of these movies hides the message until near the end I complain about it as a sleazy bait-and-switch. And again, this one did do that to a degree, and that's why I can't give it the ten stars I'd like to, but also again, it was too well done to describe that way.

First, this movie does an exceptional job of creating characters. From start to finish, every character you meet feels like a real person in a way I haven't seen in maybe decades. I can't praise it enough, honestly... it's like when you've had a head cold for a month, then suddenly your senses clear and you can hear and smell in a way you'd forgotten, and the world is a richer place than it was a minute ago. Watching this movie makes every character you've seen in the last twenty years look like a rough sketch on thin paper. It's crazy. This is the usual horror movie cast of teens and twentysomethings plus a few adults, and they do the same annoying things those characters always do: they get drunk, they flirt, they make bad decisions, they go to loud parties and stumble into the woods, but instead of being infuriating, they're all likeable somehow. No one is a caricature, no one is a stereotype - and I'm comparing this to serious drama, not just b-horror. This outclasses every character in the most hyper-sincere, emotionally-charged prestige picture in recent memory. These people are bloody Shakespearean. Infinite praise to the writing, the direction, and the cast. The characters of Ryan, Mariel, and Jason are particularly impressive, which probably shouldn't be a surprise since they're the protagonists, but the depth and realism of their relationships and the portrayal of their feelings for each other, not cloying or aloof, but supportive and flawed is worth calling out. So there's that.

The horror story itself is good. Very good, even. And unlike a lot of Metaphor Movies, it holds together right up to the end. The story is never fully sacrificed for the message. Oh, the metaphor here is trauma, by the way, like it almost always is. In this case it's the spectre of suicide and the shadow it casts over a family.

The alarm bells that the whole thing might be a metaphor start to ring about halfway through, when you realize the movie is spending a LOT of time on the characters' emotional and daily lives and relatively little developing the story. The story is still simmering in the background, but for every five minutes spent on the ghostly mystery there are twenty spent on how the characters are feeling and reacting to more mundane matters. The only reason for that, it may then occur to you, would be if the feelings were the important part and the ghost is secondary. If that's the case... well, there's only one place it can be going.

Ultimately the movie only has two real flaws as far as I'm concerned. First and most significantly is that imbalance between the emotional content and the plot; there's just too much of one and too little of the other. Second is the ending, which, like all its Metaphor Movie peers, drops the story in favor of the message, BUT it does in a way that doesn't *break* the story. It still works, you just don't get any resolution. That's not a terrible thing, though; lots of great movies have ambiguous endings. Is it a bait-and-switch? Maybe a little, and the result is an ending that will satisfy the audience that was watching for the message more than the one watching for the plot, but neither side of the theater will be left completely hanging.

Oh, and since all of my reviews address modern movies' approach to social issues and messaging, I guess I should include it here. It's pretty darn good on that score. Honestly, I should be praising it to the heavens for its treatment of male characters as human. The story focuses on three brothers, which is rare in itself, but even more unusually it takes their emotions seriously, acknowledges that all people are affected by trauma, is willing to show them crying, terrified, and in pain, as well as angry and closed off. The only drawback for me is it also leans a little too hard into the depiction of men as handling their emotions by bottling them up and violently lashing out, which, while certainly a real phenomenon, is not specific to men and is a stereotype I dislike. Then again, there genuinely are people out there for whom that behavior is normal, and they watch movies, too. Anything else on this side of things? Eh... Mariel makes a few casually abusive jokes, but they do come off as jokes and don't seem to reflect anything except a little of the last few years' cultural norms.

Also, can I call attention to how great a job Michael Boatman always does? Why do we not see Michael Boatman in more stuff? Good to see you, Michael, you rock.

Here endeth my review of The Shade. Head and shoulders above its peers, with maybe a little bit of dandruff.

You spent two precious hours of my time to explain nothing! Where is the explanation about what I'm looking at and why is this movie so long just to leave people hanging? Is this a generational curse? A curse for the men in the family? Or is the illness a generational curse that's causing all of these issues? Why aren't these idiots taking medication? You seek therapy but don't seek any other preventative measures. This movie is literally about how self destructive people with mental illnesses are but how it also impacts those around them. Yet for some reason I doubt that was the intent. The musical score is horrible and doesn't match the mood or the movie. You didn't just give the creature the middle finger, you gave it to the audience too.

You spent two precious hours of my time to explain nothing! Where is the explanation about what I'm looking at and why is this movie so long just to leave people hanging? Is this a generational curse? A curse for the men in the family? Or is the illness a generational curse that's causing all of these issues? Why aren't these idiots taking medication? You seek therapy but don't seek any other preventative measures. This movie is literally about how self destructive people with mental illnesses are but how it also impacts those around them. Yet for some reason I doubt that was the intent. You didn't just give the creature the middle finger, you gave it to the audience too.

Despite the fact of never having heard about director Tyler Chipman's 2023 horror movie "The Shade", as I stumbled upon it here in 2025, of course I needed no persuasion to watch the movie, given my love of all things horror.

The narrative in the movie is a bit slow paced, and that sort of makes it a bit of a drag and a test of will to sit through the movie. There was very little of anything overly interesting happening as the narrative dragged on and one. So writers Tyler Chipman and David Purdy didn't really impress me with the script and storyline that the conjured up for this movie.

The only familiar faces on the cast list for me were actors Michael Boatman and Brendan Sexton III. Despite the fact that the script was a sluggish affair, I will still say that the acting performances in "The Shade" were fair.

This was not a movie that made use of an abundance of special effects, I can't really claim that the effects were doing much to lift up the movie in general.

While I did manage to sit through the entire movie in its 127 minute runtime, I did almost drift off to sleep once or twice along the way. With a runtime could have benefitted from a round-handed trimming down in post editing.

I would not recommend you to throw away 127 minutes of your life on this movie, it just simply doesn't have the entertainment value to sustain such a long runtime. Nor is it a movie that I will ever suffer through a second time.

My rating of director Tyler Chipman's 2023 movie "The Shade" lands on a generous three out of ten stars.

This movie was honestly awful. With how the movie began, the font of the posters and it being categorized as a horror movie it is not one. It's one of those those really awful movies that's just all dialouge and nothing really happens through out the movie and it's one of those movies that you always have to think if the supernatural thing is actually happening or it's just the character hallucinating. But I actually did like most of the characters especially Ryan, he was just cool and the acting was ok. But good characters isn't enough to save a boring movie like this, this movie actually needed to be a horror movie with real stuff happening for it to have any sort of redemption. I don't write reviews often cause I'm bad at them but when it's a movie as boring and bad as this one I usually try my best even if it saves one person their time, this movie wasn't even worth the 50 cent online fee for regal unlimited.

TL;DR: not a horror movie, it's a dialogue driven movie about the character Ryan getting over his fathers death.