Taking on the role of emotional custodian in the wake of tragedy is never an easy thing, especially when it’s a child doing so after a parent’s death by suicide. Tyler Chipman’s The Shade is an examination of how that role can be doubly complicated by the inability or unwillingness of the surviving family members to do their share of the lifting when it comes to healing.
Ryan is doing the best he can given the circumstances; his father’s suicide obviously and understandably threw the rest of the family a curveball and devastated all of them. But things have approached a new normal for them. His mother has started dating again, his younger brother seems to be adjusting, and he himself is an apprentice at a local tattoo studio and plans on eventually moving out with his girlfriend. Alas, all of this is once again rocked when his older brother returns home from college, acting strangely distant and hostile. Things take a terrifying turn when Ryan begins seeing a ghastly specter everywhere he goes, and it becomes clear that whatever horror befell their father may be awaiting the rest of the family as well.
Chipman takes an earnest approach to a rather delicate subject with The Shade. For all the hub bub over ‘grief and trauma as a source of horror’ that there’s been in recent years (something yours truly is guilty of, I admit) The Shade never feels exploitive or like it’s an attempted jumping on a trend. While I don’t think it’s entirely successful in what it sets out to do in that at times it feels unfocused, undeveloped, and a touch melodramatic, the film never comes off as anything other than an honest attempt at discourse on mental health, grief, and inherited trauma. It feels like Chipman is attempting something a bit outside of his capabilities, but I’ll gladly take a sincere swing and a miss over an ironic grand slam any day of the week (plus a banger Converge track over the end credits). There aren’t many truly frightening moments, but there’s nothing cheap about the set up for those scares. The creature design is effective and there’s no cornball jump scares.
The Shade is by no means a horror masterpiece, and that’s fine. Not every movie needs to be some kind of out of the park hit (it’s playoff season and the Mets have a shot; let me have my baseball metaphors). Intention and effort go a long way, and Tyler Chipman absolutely has good intentions with this film. It’s an authentic attempt at tackling an issue that I will always appreciate the discussion of, and it’s also a commentary upon the importance of “keep on keeping on” when it comes to dealing with grief.
