LastingAware The greatest movie ever!

Bardlerx Strictly average movie

Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

one-nine-eighty While being annoying at times, racist at others, and up its own self-righteousness at other times - this film ended up being mildly decent actually - but only mildly decent mind you. Some of it has been done better elsewhere but some of it is annoyingly fresh and decent. A good reminder of how simple and raw a horror film can be without the need for a bloodbath or CGI monsters. It's all about how a journalist's trip to Poland goes horribly wrong. In actual fact the story should never have gotten off the ground. A young journalist cons her boss into paying for a trip to report on a story. Instead of going to Oregon, as intended, she kind of misappropriates company money and lies in order to go to Poland; her intention is to investigate the disappearance of an American backpacker. Her theory is, writing a great story will make her boss forgive her, but also might get her moved to reporting big stories instead of writing stories on bees. In reality she shouldn't have needed to go, there's police, detectives, investigator - a whole host of other people who should have done the investigating. When the 3 people get to Poland they are treated as outsiders. The Polish people are portrayed as backwards, culturally inept people who practically live a Mormon lifestyle. The American friends actually find this as intimidating as much as they do the language barrier - FFS, did they not expect a language barrier, did they expect they can just wander around anywhere they want without being questioned, wandering into gardens, farm houses, stables, cursed forests - FFS - one of the many reasons they deserved to die! There are no subtitles in the film, which is done on purpose to make the audience feel as detached as the 3 friends, it's easy enough to figure out what's going on though so threat not. Things start going bad. They are hounded by locals, the find a cursed statue in the permanently foggy forest; they bump into religious cult extremists. I don't mind spoiling this film on account of it being pretty obvious - people who see the statue get cursed by an ancient evil and turn into killers. The Religious extremists are actually doing humanity a favour by killing anybody who sees the statue.This gets a 4 from me. It was a decent attempt and would be amazing if this was a final year film student's production. There's lot s of room for improvement though - it had potential and just stayed on the side of not fully using that potential.

allwinsuar The Shrine is an incredibly tense and entertaining cinematic experience that should keep horror fans guessing until the very end and further proves that Knautz is a filmmaking force to be reckoned with. The Shrine builds and builds and builds, until it finally shows just what it is made of.Definitely not worth the IMDb rating.

edwardtoyebo Most of today's horror films are tepid at best. Originality is hard to come by. Picked this one out on Netflix, hoping for the best. Got way more than expected. The Shrine is highly recommended.A determined journalist, her boyfriend and a young intern travel to Europe in search of a story involving tourist's who, over a period of years, disappear under similar circumstances. A journal written by the latest missing tourist leads the trio to a small Polish village that harbors a fog enshrouded secret. The village inhabitants will go to deadly means to keep the secret hidden from outsiders. What follows as the trio unknowingly fall prey to their journalistic instincts will have you on the edge of your seat.This is one smart, well paced and intriguing piece of horror. The characters are full dimensional. The plot unfolds at a crisp and believable pace. Rarely does this one resort to jump scares. The horror comes from a sense of ever building dread. Lighting is key to unnerving the senses. The violence and bloodshed on display never panders to the gore hounds. After viewing this one, I took a few moments and pondered what I would have done differently had I found myself in similar circumstances. So few of today's horror films generate that type of reaction. When I plan a European vacation, I will avoid Polish villages out in the woods at all cost's.

BA_Harrison Investigative journalist Carmen (Cindy Sampson) travels to Kozki, Poland, with her photographer boyfriend Marcus (Aaron Ashmore) and intern Sara (Meghan Heffern) to try and find out what has happened to a missing American backpacker. There, they experience hostility from the locals, who are harbouring a terrible secret hidden by a strange fog in the middle of the woods.At first it seems like The Shrine is simply another xenophobic horror, existing to perpetuate the myth that rural Eastern Europe is a backwards hellhole, and anyone from America foolish enough to pay a visit is destined to die a horrible death. In a rather neat twist at the end of the film, it transpires that the hostile locals are in fact the good guys (of a sort), desperately trying to prevent a terrible evil from possessing unwary travellers and escaping their village.This neat, unexpected turnaround of events helps prevent the film from being a total disaster, but the fact is that, for much of the time, this is frustratingly routine stuff, the American characters predictably ignoring all warnings, doing their utmost to ensure that they wind up dead, and the Polish villagers acting in a threatening manner and carrying out grisly rituals, when all they really need to do is quarantine the area that is cursed (build a big wall or fence around the foggy part of the woods—problem solved).What I learnt from The Shrine: all Polish 10-year-olds can confidently converse in English.