Shaman is directed by Antonio Negret and the cast includes Sara Canning, Daniel Gillies, Jett Klyne
My Thoughts on Shaman
Shaman brings some eerie energy from the opening shot, where everything looks beautiful and calm, but you can feel that something’s not quite right, and the movie doesn't waste much time trying to build suspense with cheap tricks.
It just drops you into this missionary community, shows a baptism, and then cuts to Candice (Sara Canning) keeping one eye on her son while pretending to be part of the celebration.
The setup is great on paper. Missionaries are trying to convert an Indigenous community, and we’re watching through the eyes of this one family, where Elliot, the kid, decides to wander into a cave the locals warned him not to enter.
She does eventually find him in the end, being cared for by a Shaman, before the kid falls under some sort of possession.
Here’s what frustrated me the most about Shaman, the movie sets up this rich clash between cultures - Catholic missionaries who think they have all the answers, and Indigenous people whose land and traditions are being stepped on, but it doesn’t actually do anything with it.
You keep waiting for the story to dig into those differences, to really show the conflict between belief systems, but instead it just turns into another bog standard possession movie, and I’ve seen enough of those to know the beats by heart, and this one doesn’t add anything new.
Sara Canning gave a strong performance though. She made Candice feel paranoid, scared, and stubborn, and even when I didn’t agree with her choices (What's new?), I understood her fear.
She has this skill where the whole mood changes just through her face, and the few times the film actually attempts to show something layered is through her.
The last act of the film is where it just lost me entirely. The tone goes from unsettling and restrained to loud, theatrical, and over the top. Instead of exploring the moral questions it started with, it leans on exorcism clichés, and by then, all the promise of the beginning had drained away.
The film has a far more meaningful story right there under the surface the whole time, and it just gets ignored, which is very frustrating.
Visually, I liked how the movie looked in the first half. Cinematographer Daniel Andrade made the missionary community glow like a picture-perfect postcard, then slowly darkened the atmosphere until it felt hostile.
That shift worked well, at least until the movie abandoned its subtler tone. Once the theatrics kicked in, even the visuals felt flatter, like the style was fighting with the story instead of supporting it.
Shaman is a film that starts strong but just can’t follow through. It brushes up against big ideas about faith and colonialism, then backs away into safer horror territory.
While I didn’t completely hate it, as there were moments that are fairly effective, and Canning deserves a lot of credit, it did leave me wishing the filmmakers trusted their own setup instead of falling back on the same exorcism tropes I’ve seen a hundred times.
A wasted opportunity overall.