Shadow Of God (2025)
Shadow of God: Unfortunately, Little More | 2/5
Written by Noah Dietz: 5/3/2025
Over the last couple years while watching movies with my partner, we’ve made the choice to watch all the trailers that play at the front of my old DVDs and Blu-rays. Sometimes it’s a fun time capsule, but other times you wonder how anybody thought this was a good way to promote a film. Frankly, it’s sometimes even worse for movies I recognize. So many of them convey the wrong tone, make good movies look cheap, and bad movies look great. Nowhere outside of that containment have I felt this energy the most than when I see the trailers Shudder posts for their new movies.
I had opened Facebook one day and after about two seconds of scrolling, I got my normal dose of “way too many ads.” This time was Shudder, and even though I found myself disappointed in the last “Shudder original” I watched from them (825 Forest Road), I figured I would give this a shot anyway. The trailer had a good energy and ended up being just enough to tip me over into interest. I can waffle back and forth on exorcism movies, but I’m currently in a bit of a revival so I decided to jump in with both feet.
The opening of the film is rather strong. We’re in Guadalajara, Mexico, and our protagonist and senior exorcist Mason Harper (Mark O’Brien) is in a battle against a demon. Afterward, a call to the Vatican to report his colleague's death gives us insight that the church is losing exorcists by the truckload, and an official order has come down from the top that all exorcisms are to be suspended until further notice. Exhausted with his work, he returns to his hometown and his childhood best friend Tanis Green (Jacqueline Byers) to recharge and recenter. Unfortunately, this is also where he and Tanis had escaped a cult run by his father, Angus Harper (Shaun Johnston), when they were teens, his father dying in the process. While home, Mason learns his father has apparently come back from the dead, with the sheriff who’d initially helped him escape dropping a living Angus off with Mason and simply saying, “Resurrections … are more your jurisdiction than mine.” What follows is a reveal that all is not what it might seem, and perhaps Angus’s heresy of the past had a little more to it than Mason had originally thought. Angus is the vessel of God, and not a man possessed by demons as Mason had originally assumed. Over the years Mason has been gone, God won’t let Angus stay dead no matter how hard he might try. That’s why Angus is here now, to try to avoid kicking off the end of the world. God, in this film, is an angry, jaded being. He’s here to shut down everything, setting off the end times so he can, assumedly, start over again.
The remnants of Angus’s old cult never truly disbanded, and they’re fully sold out for this to happen. Much of the middle of the film ends up being Angus pleading with Mason to help him, with Mason refusing based on the mistaken assumption that his father had been influenced by demons his entire life. Though Angus had groomed Mason to be the perfect medium for bringing God to the world, he had a change of heart when it came to the actual end of the world being apparent. The remaining cultists have no such issues, enacting brutal “justice” on any who get in the way of their plan to enact God’s will.
There’s so much here that’s just moments away from being an all-out hit. The cult is almost compelling and frightening! But the inclusion of the strange eunuch character is a confusingly directed comedic relief we didn’t need at all. The concept of an exorcism not working because it’s actually an angelic being and not a demonic one is fun too! But the scope of the story is so blown out that it’s difficult to actually care about what’s happening by the end. By the time the devil himself shows up to hand our protagonist an angel-slaying weapon, it feels goofy and cheap, his presence barely serving as a symbolic turn for Mason—right up until it doesn’t.
The exorcism work in this, especially the intro, is fun to watch. The opening shows Mason outsmarting the demon by using the blood of his fallen fellow as “the blood of a martyr” to protect himself. Additionally, we see him running the gauntlet of the priest who struggles. Though this is an incredibly played out trope, in my opinion the film doesn’t run it into the ground as much as it does its other elements. Mason doesn’t struggle necessarily with his faith in God so much as with his own past and what that can mean for him in the long term. Seeing his world crumble a little when he realizes the implication of the situation is okay, if a little hokey. That’s not to say the exhausting “priest who drinks and smokes” isn’t here, with Mason knocking back an entire bottle of what seems to be scotch after having a thirty-second argument with Tanis.
By the time the film closes we’re left with more than a few too many phoned-in performances on top of a script that could have used one or two more rounds of edits to tighten things up. I think this could have been more fun with the story focused on Mason and Tanis more directly confronting the situation of God possessing Angus. A woman of science and a man of God dealing with their own pasts coming back to haunt them would be solid, if a little well trod. As it stands it’s not a complete waste of time, but I can’t recommend it for anyone who’s looking for a more serious religious horror film. Shadow of God might bill itself as one, but it doesn’t stick the middle, much less the landing.