by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $14.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Mani Shanks, Jason Robert Lester, John Jarratt
Intro:
… keeps things aggressively tense, the real trick here is how much it deviates from similar youngling-led home invasion yarns.
Steven J. Mihaljevich has come a long way from his YouTube 2010s satire days. Starting out by taking the piss out of the pick-up artist community with his ‘Sneaky Steev’ web series, he has since grown into a confident and capable filmmaker with a solid track record for inventive and viscerally distressing cinema.
From the abstract terrors of Widow, to the sunburnt crime drama The Xrossing, to the psychedelic nightmare fuel of Violett (among whose many visual merits is a Poohniverse-ified Mr. Squiggle), his skills behind the camera are matched by an enviable consistency in his output.
With his latest, Shed, Mihaljevich has presented his most stripped-back feature yet, following ten-year-old Mia (Mani Shanks) getting locked in the titular shed after a Yuletide game of hide-and-seek turns murderous.
Mihaljevich and DP Shane Piggot keep the visuals secured tightly to Mia’s POV, to the point where the audience never really gets a proper look at the face of the Stranger (Jason Robert Lester) behind all this.
While the claustrophobic desperation of Mia’s situation keeps things aggressively tense, the real trick here is how much it deviates from similar youngling-led home invasion yarns. Mia isn’t blood rage waiting to be unleashed like Becky, nor is she well-off enough to have an abundance of tools at her disposal like Kevin McCallister in Home Alone. She is simply a child trying to get through a situation in which she is entirely out of her depth. She secures water where she can, makes a stick friend named Lucy for company, and while she tries to contact anyone outside that imposing steel door… that itself might just make things worse for her.
The specific angle of this domestic thriller is reminiscent of 10 Cloverfield Lane in its both-options-horrify parameters. Stay inside, and likely starve to death. Get outside, and not only discover what has happened to her family, but possibly run into the man responsible for it. The role asks a lot of young Mani Shanks physically and emotionally, and with the rare snippets of monologue afforded her, she does an astounding job at not only selling the tragedy surrounding her, but also her drive to overcome it. Her presence on-screen as is already fires up that instinctive want to protect this poor child in the worst of distresses, but her performance also shows that the rapport her and Mihaljevich showed back with Violett still has room to grow, as does her own latent talents.
As gripping as this film is, the actual content feels stretched very close to breaking point. By the halfway point, the story’s own high concept foundation starts to crack and crumble, like a short film artificially bulked-up to become feature length. This isn’t helped by the John Jarratt cameo, which struggles to fit in tonally with the material. Is it simply a tribute to Wolf Creek, a microcosm of the perverse voyeurism tied to the fixation on relentless slasher villains like the Stranger in these kinds of movies, or just an excuse to have ol’ mate Johnny be both bizarre and entertaining on-screen again? For a film this sparse and direct, it stands out as a “well, that happened” moment.
Shed may lack some of the tools needed to make the most of its already-stunted screen time, but for a two-hander domestic thriller, it’s still effective. Mani Shanks’ lead performance makes this worth checking out all on its own, both for the connection to her horrific circumstances and the small but piercing moments of hope that come from every small victory that she grasps. Even though it lacks the surreal punch of Violett or the emotional hits of The Xrossing, it shows Mihaljevich still being inventive and musing on how influence from others (be they family, friends, neighbours, even online randos) affects us as people.
