SHADOW OF GOD (2025)

Studio:   Shudder
Director: Michael Peterson
Writer:   Tim Cairo
Producer: Kurtis David Harder, Taylor Nodrick, Kendall Anlian, David Hiatt, Michael Peterson
Stars:    Mark O’Brien, Jacqueline Byers, Shaun Johnston, Adrian Hough, Josh Cruddas

Review Score:

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Summary:

An exorcist who escaped a cult as a youth faces his greatest challenge when his abusive father seemingly returns from the dead claiming to be possessed by an unexpected entity.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

In Guadalajara, Mexico, jaded priest Father Mason Harper and his inexperienced partner Father Daniel Scott perform an exorcism on a girl believed to be possessed by a demon that refuses to reveal its name. Overtaken by the entity, the girl kills Father Scott by supernaturally throwing him into a wall. She then grabs Mason by his throat. Coating his palm in “martyr blood” dripping out of the dead priest’s head, Mason grabs the girl’s forehead to forcibly cast out the spirit.

Mason phones Father Gabrielle at the Vatican to report he was unable to identify the demon, but it seemingly knew who he was. Upon informing him of Father Scott’s death, Father Gabrielle instructs Mason to not tell anyone what happened. Mason is stunned to learn Rome wants to keep the matter quiet because Father Scott was the sixth exorcist killed that same day.

Mason returns to his hometown in Southern Alberta, Canada. While waiting for his longtime friend, psychiatrist Dr. Tanis Green, to pick him up, Mason seemingly sees his dead father Angus jump off a nearby bridge and vanish.

When she picks him up, Mason tells Tanis about seeing his father, which should be impossible because he died when they were younger. Mason and Tanis recall how Angus was the leader of a local religious cult called the Congregation of the New Rapture, which they both escaped following extensive physical abuse Mason suffered at the hands of his father.

Tanis brings Mason back to her house where they argue about his faith and their shared past. After he spurns a romantic advance, Tanis angrily leaves Mason alone for the night.

Outside a liquor store, Mason sees another vision of Angus. This leads to a memory of Mason having his hands nailed to a board and being flogged while his father enthusiastically preached to an enrapt congregation about Mason being groomed as the facilitator of their salvation.

When Tanis returns the following day, Mason tells her about seeing Angus a second time. Claiming the sightings are a manifestation of guilt, Tanis tells Mason that Angus wasn’t possessed by evil like Mason had come to believe, but rather, he was probably a schizophrenic narcissist who would have eventually killed his son if he wasn’t stopped.

Tanis receives an emergency call regarding a mentally disturbed patient, Stan Larson, who claimed he saw a man jump off the same bridge where she picked up Mason. Tanis personally interviews Stan, who tells her he saw the jumper violently die and then inexplicably walk away unscathed, which Stan interpreted as a miracle indicating end times have come.

Sheriff Glen Burke visits Mason at Tanis’s home to show him he found his disheveled father wandering down the middle of a highway. Confused, frightened, and uncertain what else to do, Burke releases Angus into Mason’s custody. Despite him having been dead for years, Mason confirms the man is his father.

Angus cryptically warns his son, “They’re looking for us” and claims if they are found, they will die. Believing his mysterious reappearance proves he was aligned with a demon, Mason tells Angus he never wanted anything bad to happen to him and says he hopes he can help his father.

On his drive away from Tanis’s place, Sheriff Burke is stopped by Angus’s former congregant Beau, who is now the Grand Cleric of the cult, and two other men. When Burke refuses to reveal Angus’s whereabouts, Beau and the cultists shoot Burke to death.

Tanis becomes suspicious when she sees one of the cultists driving Sheriff Burke’s patrol vehicle. Tanis drives to the police station to report what she saw, but after she leaves, Officer Lestor secretly calls Beau to tell him about Tanis.

While bathing Angus, Mason notices strange runes carved into his chest. Sensing a supernatural presence entering the house to possess him, Angus apologizes for what happened with his congregation by claiming he was tricked. He additionally tells Mason that his work as an exorcist is merely manipulation and Angus refuses to be an accomplice. Promising to purge the demon from him, Mason contends Angus always thought he was channeling God when the opposite was true. Angus counters that “sadly,” he is still God’s vessel, not Satan’s.

Mason flashes back to he and Tanis as teenagers when they worked with Sheriff Burke and the police to conduct a raid on the cult’s compound that ended with Angus being repeatedly shot to death. Mason wakes from his memory to find his father strangling him. Possessed by the presence, Angus shouts that “he” has found them and “he” won’t let Angus die. Mason eventually restrains Angus to a bed.

Tanis sneaks into the cult’s farmland compound and finds cultists indoctrinating members by carving crosses into their foreheads. Tanis briefly subdues one of the guards, but she ends up captured and knocked unconscious.

Mason starts performing holy blessings in his father’s room. Angus warns that Mason is empowering “him.” Angus also begs to be killed by Mason so perhaps he can finally die.

Mason calls Sheriff Burke’s phone. Unbeknownst to Mason, Beau takes the call and learns Angus is at Tanis’s home.

Mason calls Father Gabrielle again, but learns he was killed during an exorcism the previous evening. The priest on the other end forbids Mason from performing any further rituals until a full investigation into the deaths has been conducted.

Mason notices ectoplasm on his father’s forehead. The room erupts in paranormal activity as Mason hurries out.

Despite his father’s warning, Mason later returns to the room to prepare an exorcism for Angus. The entity speaks to Mason in his mind. Asked its identity, the spirit recounts how it manipulated Angus and Mason, and how humanity cannot resist its force. Unable to have an effect on the presence, Mason tests a hunch by turning his cross upside down, which causes Angus to tear at his face.

While held captive, Tanis witnesses cultists following orders from a eunuch elder to execute one of their members for having had sexual intercourse. With her hands nailed to a board, the eunuch interrogates Tanis next. The eunuch orders her execution until one of the women in the cult recognizes Tanis as a cohort of Mason Harper, whom the congregation refers to as “The Shepherd” who will conduct “The Summoning” and fulfill the prophecy Angus used to preach about.

Lucifer appears to Mason. Claiming humanity is done with God, and therefore God is done with humanity, Satan warns that God is inside Angus, and if He is allowed to take mortal form, the world will end. Lucifer explains that even God needs a medium to be summoned, because He has to be present in the world in order to destroy it, so Satan has been killing exorcists to prevent this from happening. According to the Devil, God was guiding Angus to prepare Mason for this purpose all these years to lay the foundation for humanity’s demise.

Identifying them both as abused children, Lucifer tells Mason it is their duty to make sure their fathers cannot harm them again. Mason refuses to make a pact with the Devil despite his warning that catastrophic death is coming.

Beau arrives right after Angus’s bedroom door bursts off its hinges. Beau has his associate Randall confine Angus to a containment unit built like a sarcophagus. Proclaiming today as the day Angus always foretold in his prophecy, Beau then threatens Mason to conduct the exorcism ritual.

Mason manages to escape outside where he secretly stows away in the bed of Randall’s pickup truck. Mason sneaks away when Beau and Randall stop at a convenience store. Mason then goes inside the store to call for help, but the clerk unexpectedly knocks him out with a baseball bat.

While unconscious, Mason has a vision in which he is given a blade identified as a relic capable of slaying all that is holy. Mason wakes up in chains next to Tanis in the cult’s compound, but with the blade in his hand. Mason gets the blade over to Tanis before the cultists turn their attention toward him.

Mason’s hands are nailed to a board. Beau begins flogging him while demanding Mason repent for his sins. Mason warns if the presence inside Angus really is God, then the ritual will bring about the end of everything. Beau reveals the rapture is what the cult desires. Angus splintered from them when he came to realize what he was facilitating, but the rest of the congregation insists the apocalypse is God’s will.

After his torture, the cultists cut a cross into Mason’s forehead. With his father locked in the coffin-like containment unit, Beau and the other assembled cultists force Mason to start the summoning. A bright beam of light emanates from the head of the containment unit as the congregants worship in anxious awe.

The eunuch rushes forward to gaze into the light. His head immediately explodes. Spirals of light subsequently circle the room, killing the cultists before returning to the coffin.

Angus emerges from the containment unit as a being whose physical body forms a portal to unknown space. Bearing the upside-down cross again, Mason calls on the power of Satan to banish the presence from his father. The spirit taunts Mason as another burst of light demands he repent to be saved.

In the adjacent room, Tanis frees herself from her restraints to attack her guard. She then recovers a handgun she uses to shoot at Angus, but he is unfazed. Angus knocks Tanis to the floor.

Mason recovers the blade Tanis dropped and stabs Angus in his stomach. Lucifer’s voice tells Mason their fathers abdicated their reign, and they must be killed to save them all. Mason uses the relic to stab the manifestation of Satan. Lucifer claims the stabbing was futile because the weapon only harms the divine, but Mason points out that no matter how their fathers wounded them, there is still a piece of them within Mason and Satan, meaning something divine inside the fallen angel can still be affected by the blade. Lucifer bursts into flames and disappears.

Mason uses the blade to slice open his hand. Using the blood of a “fallen” servant of God the same way he used martyr’s blood in Mexico, Mason casts the presence out of his father.

Mason escorts Tanis outside as the barn erupts in small explosions. Angus’s body falls over. With his final words, Angus apologizes to his son for everything he did. Mason forgives him. Angus seemingly dies.

After throwing his clerical collar to the ground, Mason and Tanis walk off together. At the morgue later, Angus’s body unexpectedly begins moving its hand.

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Review:

Jaded priest Mason Harper looks like how jaded horror fans feel about the prospect of watching yet another exorcism movie. “Shadow of God” starts with Mason sitting slumped on a bed in Guadalajara, Mexico. Inhaling a long drag on a cigarette, Mason mutters, “Let’s be done with this already. We all know how this ends.” When the bloody-fingered girl in the corner continues clawing at a wall without responding, Mason adds, “You really want us to go through this whole song and dance?” Exhaling an exhausted sigh, he then tells his partner, “Okay, Father Scott, no choice but to go through the whole routine.” Out comes the holy water. The girl taunts Mason in an evil voice. Standard supernatural activity ensues.

Mason immediately makes a sympathetic surrogate for the viewer because his bored “been there, done that” attitude reflects the same stance toward demonic possession as someone who has seen too many similar setups to remember which was which. Facing a familiar situation, Mason and the audience reluctantly resolve to go through the motions once more whether they like it or not. The bad news for Mason, which turns into good news for viewers, is where “Shadow of God” goes after this deceptively typical prologue is somewhere entirely unexpected, and not at all ordinary.

Upon returning home to Alberta, Mason witnesses something more unbelievable than a crippled teen paranormally propelling a priest into a wall. While waiting for his longtime friend Tanis to pick him up, Mason seemingly sees his father Angus jump from a bridge and vanish. Such a sight is disturbing enough. More unsettling is the fact that his father has been dead for years.

Tanis tells Mason it must have been imaginary. As youths, both of them were unwillingly indoctrinated in Angus’s cult, a congregation of rapture radicals who came to believe Angus would facilitate their salvation by turning Mason into “The Shepherd.” Angus’s methods for molding Mason included nailing his hands to a board and flogging him while proselytizing to his fanatical flock. This ongoing abuse only ended when authorities shot Angus to death during a raid on the cult’s compound. Convinced his father was overcome by a malevolent influence, Mason healed through renewed faith in God, eventually becoming an exorcist working on behalf of The Vatican.

Mason’s confusion continues following a second sighting of his deceased father. Confusion turns to confounded fear when the sheriff who shot Angus arrives the next day with an unexpected passenger in his cruiser. Impossibly, Angus was found wandering in the road. Not a ghost. Not a lookalike. Mason’s flesh and blood father really has inexplicably risen from the grave.

Taking his reappearance as proof he was aligned with a demon, Mason promises to banish the evil from Angus. Angus warns not everything is as it seems. A powerful presence has indeed possessed Angus. But the identity of the entity Angus claims is inside him will shake the foundation of everything Mason believes, draw out the cult to fulfill their prophecy, and force Mason to consider a deal with the devil in order to save his father, and possibly all of humanity.

Being a comparatively quieter, compact Canadian creeper, “Shadow of God” doesn’t have the flash to match the bigger-budgeted flair of levitating contortionists, bombastic hellscapes, or head-swiveling soup hurlers. But the movie doesn’t need more than it already has. “Shadow of God’s” consistently chilly atmosphere, slow-simmering dread, and thematic substance deliver all the eeriness, mystery, and contemplative drama anyone could want from a film built for psychological suspense.

Without being preachy or predictable, Tim Cairo’s script uses metaphoric meanings to fashion a crafty tale about dealing with inherited sins, and challenging faith-based beliefs. Don’t take this to mean the movie meanders into interpretive philosophy or arthouse abstractness. “Shadow of God’s” terrors are as tangible as any other fright film featuring manifestations of Lucifer and religious zealots committing unspeakable acts. Yet in addition to the visceral madness of murderous cultists and a “Raiders of the Lost Ark”-like finale, “Shadow of God” keeps you captivated with constant questions about what is the truth and what will ultimately happen.

In spots, acting can come off as exaggerated, but only by supporting players like an overly excitable mental patient and a certain cult figure who took too much inspiration from a “Game of Thrones” influence. The three leads though, put on understated yet authentic performances by infusing their roles with no more than what’s required to create engaging characters.

You might not buy Mark O’Brien as an average parish priest in a mainstream movie. You are, however, willing to make that purchase as Mason, because his specific backstory comes bundled with emotional baggage believably etched into O’Brien’s perpetually haunted expression. As Mason’s father, Shaun Johnston’s eyes bear a similar sadness from having soaked up too many horrific sights in his time. Combined with Jacqueline Byers doing equally proficient work to keep Tanis grounded even in the face of extreme events, the core cast competes for the VIP trophy in an imaginary contest where screenwriter Tim Cairo and director Michael Peterson are just as deserving of the award for how real they make their fantastical film feel.

Conceptually compelling and exceptionally executed, “Shadow of God” is the most memorable, claw-into-your-mind-and-stay-there possession movie since “The Exorcist.” I would not lightly toss up a comparison like that if it wasn’t earned. I simply cannot think of another film in the last 50 years that has handled these subjects and this style of suggestive scares with such finely tuned tones. In a subgenre of horror predominantly populated by rehashes of the same “troubled priest finds his faith again while fighting to save a tortured soul” story, “Shadow of God” stands out as a true original.

Review Score: 85

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