Five years ago, Camille Sullivan delivered one of the most desperate and heartbreaking endings to a film imaginable through a mere look. With paranormal horror Shelby Oaks, she does the same again.
Indeed, it was her performance in survival horror Hunter Hunter as Anne, a woman shattered by an unspeakable crime against her, that won over producer Aaron B. Koontz (of Austin’s Paper Street Pictures) and director Chris Stuckmann for her to be Mia, the doomed protagonist of this multilayered occult chiller.
It’s not giving anything away to suggest that she’s doomed. There’s too much darkness festering around her, even if it’s seemingly swarmed most violently around her sister, Riley (Sarah Durn). Maybe that’s why Riley decided to become co-host of online ghost hunting show Paranormal Paranoids, and why they seem to be the only investigators who find more than just a few dust motes on their camera. But Riley’s gone, lost to a place called Shelby Oaks, a deserted town with a bleak history that slew her friends and seemingly swallowed her up without a trace. And staring at the hole she left is Mia who, even after all these years, is convinced that her sister will come back to fill the void.
That’s where Sullivan is so perfect at Mia. Few performers can transmit such a sense of aching loss, of an existence defined by an absence, especially as true nightmare picks at the edges of reality. In Hunter Hunter her opponent was simply inhuman, but here she faces something that is clearly not human. It’s a shadow that has clung to Riley and seemingly snatched her away, even if Mia has doubts about believing such arcane forces can really be lurking around her small-town Midwestern life.
Shelby Oaks has undergone a transformation since Stuckmann’s original Kickstarter-funded version debuted last year at Fantasia in Toronto. With reshoots and a re-edit (courtesy of Neon, who has acquired the film for theatrical distribution), it’s lean as a hellhound. Similar to Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, there are hints of the New French Extreme in its soulless violence, but just like Cregger’s debut it hides its true nature until the final act. While there are undoubtedly some of this year’s most visceral on-screen death, Stuckmann draws most of his terror from an increasingly weighty sense of dread. The space left by Riley is depicted by Sullivan as a blind spot, but as the signs become more glaring that something terrible is happening, it becomes a black hole.
Stuckmann’s script builds a sense of damned inevitability, building layers of reality upon each other as Mia examines the found footage left by Riley. Well, not really found as it is delivered in shocking fashion rather than stumbled upon. This becomes part of the First 48-esque documentary she’s assisting to help her find Riley. Finally, wrapped around all that is the reality of what’s going on – a reality that finally crumbles under the enormity of Stuckmann’s macabre revelation. Stories become a defense mechanism but are ultimately revealed to be as worthless at fending off evil as the cameras that capture the fate of Riley’s crewmates. However, Stuckmann isn’t trying to play some tricksy game of perspectives. The nature of what has taken Riley and is threatening to engulf Mia is hidden in plain sight. It’s not so much revealed in those final moments as crystalized, giving Sullivan another of those moments of realization that she turns into all-consuming despair. The true horror of Shelby Oaks is that the audience will be holding their breath along with her until the final, terrible scream, and a moment of simple, abiding desperation.
Shelby Oaks
US premiereTuesday, Sept. 23, 11:30pm
Fantastic Fest 2025 runs Sept. 18-25, Passes and info at fantasticfest.com.
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