Shook Review (Film, 2021)

content warning: gore, violence against women, animal cruelty, alcohol abuse, grieving

A serial killer is targeting dogs and their owners. After the murder of a big influencer at a red carpet event, Mia steps back and helps her chronically ill sister by pet sitting. She’s quickly targeted by a sociopath for a night of terror. Someone wants to punish her for not being the full-time caretaker for her recently deceased mother, so she’s forced to play a deadly game over social media.

Shook plays with some interesting ideas. I’m not sure they all work out in the end, but it is an interesting experiment in using social media and digital technology in storytelling.

Writer/director Jennifer Harrington uses projection to superimpose videos, photos, text messages, and social media posts on the sets. We’ve seen films where this is edited in later, but the use of actual projected images adds a tangible element to the digital world. The messages are so neatly cropped at the beginning that they look like post processing.

Then they start to get a little blurred on the edges, going over uneven surfaces. Finally, they cover Mia herself, trapping her in the game's world she has no control over. Mia is playing a deadly game over the phone and Internet. Any attempt to use real world solutions is punished. It’s the digital world she’s created as an influencer or nothing.

The other characters in the film start appearing in these sequences as well, standing behind Mia in whatever state they’re in online. The world of the game becomes more and more real as Mia realizes there’s no escaping whatever is planned for her that night. She cannot physically be there to help her friends, but she is responsible for what happens to them.

Less successful for me is the reliance on animal cruelty in the film. You have to get through a lot of footage of murdered dogs to get into the plot of Shook. It’s shocking, yes, but I found myself pushed out of the narrative because of those images. A major element of the first act is the disappearance of Mia’s sister’s dog and the potential danger he faces. It’s not that I didn’t care what happened to Mia; I was too worried about what ghastly image of (obviously simulated for the screen) animal cruelty I would see next to really invest in her story.

While the overall film did not work for me, Shook is a well made slasher/deadly game film. The performances are good and the more experimental design elements pay off. There are some great twists and turns once you get far enough into the story.

Shook is streaming on Shudder.