Shallow Ground

A frustrating mix of the familiar, the surprising and the downright daft, Sheldon Wilson’s ambitious, underachieved horror movie ultimately squanders its best ideas. A naked teenage boy covered in blood wanders out of the forest into a remote, soon-to-be-closed sheriff’s office. Carrying a red-handled knife used to kill a local woman one year before, he meekly submits to imprisonment but will not speak. The local law officers are clueless, in both senses of the word. Is the boy a serial killer, or the manifestation of some malevolent supernatural force? More confusing than intriguing, the shambolic plot is thrown off-kilter by irrelevant subplots, obvious red herrings and clumsy flashbacks. The prisoner bleeds from his eyes and ears, half-naked women are strung up and butchered, a macabre dinner party of mummified corpses is discovered. While the orchestral score and forced sound design hint at a fertile dam-burst of dark disturbance, this ‘Shallow Ground’ ultimately proves arid. ‘No One Leaves’ is scrawled in blood on a window. Even so, you may be tempted.