Shepherd (2021)

directed by Russell Owen

UK (Scotland)

103 minutes

2.5 stars out of 5

----

Some bad press for this one on the ol' Letterboxd, but I'll watch anything for Kate Dickie at this point, and besides, the premise sounded like one of those things that couldn't possibly be bad. A grieving widower decides to leave everything behind and become a sheep-herder on a remote Scottish island where he is the only inhabitant (besides the sheep)? Who among us has not thought at least once about doing that at some point in the last two years? I didn't keep my expectations too high, anyway, and from the combination of poor reviews and anticipating a mediocre film, I basically got what I expected.

I'm sure that there was a trajectory the filmmakers planned for it to go on, but the meandering, non-linear path this film follows doesn't feel cohesive enough to be engaging. Now, this is a movie all about a guy who slowly starts losing his mind (or does he?), so cohesiveness is not the main point here, but even in films that rely heavily on dream sequences or the instability of their main character, there's got to be some kind of force pulling everything together, and Shepherd doesn't have that. It just has random frightening events happening with increasing rapidity to a guy who is entirely powerless to save himself or do anything at all to improve his situation.

However, my favorite thing about this is that those frightening events are executed very well. There's clearly an eye for the eerie and disturbing here, because while Shepherd as a whole didn't quite work for me, it contains a lot of singular images that are, by themselves, really creepy. A baby's hand reaching out of the top drawer of a nightstand, a field of crucified sheep. The looming and mysterious lighthouse. When the protagonist encounters a derelict, beached ship and begins to explore it, it might be the high point of the entire film, but it only takes up a couple of minutes and we don't even know if it was real or what it meant. The overall atmosphere is also as oppressive as you'd expect any movie set on a barren Scottish island to be, so even though the things it contained felt lacking, the film as a vessel is visually striking, with good sound work and cinematography.

I guess my complaint boiled down to its essence is that none of this means anything. Sure, it's meaningful in relation to the ungodly boring "guilt over dead spouse" backstory the main character has, and the visions he sees, to an extent, echo his own guilt. Things like his mother appearing to nag him even in his imagination and the form the wraith haunting the island takes on do relate directly to his memories, but it's too cobbled-together. There's no real order to anything and, most crucially, no context. This movie is all "me me me", or I guess "him him him"; the only important thing is the main character. He's the lens through which we view this island that I would have absolutely loved to "explore" outside of his limited perspective. There's moments where it looks like we're about to get some delicious and necessary context, where a better look at the history of the island and whatever else inhabits it (besides the sheep) seem within reach, but then it all falls to the wayside and the movie just kind of goes "Oh you know :)"

Maybe it's just me personally, but even though I could intimate some of what was happening, I would have enjoyed this far more if any of the points where it looked like there was about to be some background were expanded upon. We could have seen more of the previous shepherd's journal, for instance, instead of just seeing the protag riffle through it and land on a couple scratchy drawings of a crow and the phrase "She's a witch!" I'm so desperate to know more about that whole deal. The concept of something old and horrible haunting an island that requires a living person to... engage with? Feed off of? We don't know! We never find out. But after 103 minutes of this we do get close to feeling like we have an idea that there's some monstrous force on the island, and it's a disappointment that that was glossed over in favor of this dude and his traumatic backstory. It's a crime that this has Kate Dickie in such an ultimately crucial role and then doesn't give her enough screen time for that role to feel as important as I think it was.

I didn't dislike this entirely, but so much of it was squandered potential. I think there was an unnecessarily heavy focus on the main character when the environment around him was much more interesting than how he reacted to it. They're two totally different things, so I shouldn't really compare them, but I was thinking of the film Caveat when I was watching this and how Caveat does a similar premise (taking a weird job in an isolated, decrepit location and having bizarre things happen to you) but focuses much more on the external world rather than the protagonist's internal torment, and is much better for it. As I always say, though, this movie exists; it's the way that it is because people wanted it to be that way, and I respect that. I couldn't do any better. I can just point out things I wasn't a fan of.