Shelter

A film about multiple personalities that is more than a little troubled. Forensic psychiatrist Dr Cara Jessup (Julianne Moore), ‘a doctor of science and a woman of God’, is dedicated to debunking the myth of multiple-personality disorders. Her testimonies have sent murderers to their deaths, so she is intrigued when her father, a shrink, invites her to consider the fractured mind of a new patient, Adam (Jonathan Rhys Myers). Not even the random murder of her husband could shake Jessup’s belief in science and her faith in God, but Adam’s dislocated mind comes close. Suddenly, rationality gives way to doubt, as Jessup starts to believe that Adam’s alternate personalities are murder victims, connected in some way to an early-twentieth-century flu epidemic, some ‘devil-worshipping mountain gypsies’ and a false prophet. Moore and Rhys-Meyers act as if they’re possessed, but no one can arrest the film’s slide into noisy, supernatural nonsense.