SHAMAN - Mark Reviews Movies

Shaman, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 7, 2025

The backdrop of Shaman brings with it a lot of questions and ideas to examine. The story, from screenwriter Daniel Negret, revolves around a Catholic mission in a remote part of Ecuador, where a community of indigenous people have lived and practiced their own culture for likely centuries. Some have flocked to the mission, joined a new community, and adopted this new faith, but others still remain in a nearby village, unconvinced by and possibly resentful of the outsiders.

Well, that second part, at least, is how the script and director Antonio Negret, the writer's brother, want us to see the community members who are still sticking to their old ways and customs. This is a horror story, in which the son of the two missionaries in charge of this operation seems to be cursed by the locals and/or possessed by an ancient demon that resides in this region. Whatever intriguing notions about the specifics of this story and these characters might exist from the setup are quickly dismissed for the generic plotting of an exorcism tale.

This is particularly frustrating, because there are plenty of possible avenues to explore here—ones dealing with religious conversion, the enduring patterns of colonialism, and the mutual suspicion that exists between the two sides of the central dynamic here. Instead, we get the usual show of people speaking prayers and incantations, while a child endures supernatural torment and displays unnatural abilities.

The location, then, soon starts to feel more a cosmetic shift than a thematic one. Sure, the wide fields and rocky hills and a volcano lingering in the background make for an isolated, sometimes haunted place against which a story about demonic possession can unfold. It certainly makes it feel more helpless, because it's not as Candice (Sara Canning) and her husband Joel (Daniel Gillies) can rely on modern medicine or higher-ups in the church hierarchy to discuss what might be happening to their son.

They only have themselves, still-superstitious members of their religious community, and the local priest, who is filled with doubts and was once a medic in the Ecuadorian military, on whom to count. The more interesting questions, of course, are why the converts still have those old superstitions and the priest is so unsure of his faith, while also taking that uncertainty out on his own body, but if the location is just a set for a familiar story, the local characters here become little more than dressing for the formula of that plot.

The boy, named Elliot (Jett Klyne), loses his model plane in a cave in the hills while his parents are busy with baptism rites in a nearby stream. Searching for his toy, Elliot encounters totems and some mysterious presence inside the cave, as well as the local tribe's shaman (played by Humberto Morales), who brings the boy back to the village. After he's retrieved and returned to the mission, Elliot becomes sickly, begins behaving strangely, and has some darkness filling his veins and eyes.

Candice, of course, assumes the shaman did something to her son, perhaps as punishment for the boy entering some sacred ground or as retaliation for the mission itself. Obviously, this would make the shaman and the tribe into villains, if the woman's assumptions turn out to be correct, and while the filmmakers may have little interest in the indigenous characters of this story, they clearly aren't so wrongheaded as to make such a grave error in presenting those characters in that way.

This means that the story's sense of mystery and sort-of twist are neither mysteries nor surprises at all. There's yet another fascinating conceit in this—that the missionaries' unspoken prejudices and inherent distrust of the native people leads to more problems for the boy, the mission, and its inhabitants than anything else apart from the evil force within him. What that translates to here, though, are scenes of Elliot showing off newfound contortionist skills and of Fr. Meyer (Alejandro Fajardo), the doubtful priest who drinks to excess and punishes himself, performing that old ritual in the clichéd manner of every exorcism story that has come before this one.

It's a shame, really, to witness such a culturally specific premise and a potentially subversive setup be dismissed for more of the usual. Shaman ultimately does have something to say about the self-interested motives of people like Candice, who uses religion as a way to be seen as a savior, but such broad and superficial critique means little when the movie itself comes across as disinterested in the people who are actually affected by that thinking and those actions.

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