Shepherd

With Shepherd, the Welsh writer and director Russell Owen shows us how to accrue a great deal of atmosphere with very little fuss.

While the plot here is thin (and slow-paced, and oppressively grim), Owen has a remarkable facility for generating atmosphere. He’s made a film where one man’s internal strife has been effectively externalized as an inescapable, picturesque purgatory.

Ratcheting up the conflict and confusion becomes counter-intuitive, the escalation of violence and brutality arriving without clear motive. I can’t even decide for myself what’s happening—there’s nothing but smoke to grab. Owen stripped away the film’s own agency.

Shepherd is more of a bandwagon-jumping exercise in arthouse horror films about grief than a truly bone-chilling example of one.