Shelter

A couple traversing a post-apocalyptic world come across an abandoned medical facility where they try to hole-up for the night, not realising that something else is in there with them.

Taryn (Angus) and Conor (Jawar) are the quintessential post-apocalyptic couple, travelling light with minimal food and water, a torch and a strip light, and a baseball bat for protection. They’re heading out across the landscape of barren Ontario, the only two people on the roads for miles around, cutting across fields to try and find the one thing they need for the night – Shelter.

Luckily, not far in front of them is a small complex of buildings, completely run-down and covered in graffiti, with an opening big enough to slip through into the inside. Taryn is not doing so well though, and Conor has to encourage her to go the distance and get into the only available shelter for the night before she collapses with exhaustion. Once inside, they fire up their electric lights, powered from God knows where, and trudge through the gloomy hallways of the derelict building, placing themselves further and further into the bowels of the unknown.

They find some files scattered on the floor and decide to take them along with them, reasoning that they can use the paper for firelighters if nothing else. Soon, Taryn needs to rest and Conor leaves her somewhere he thinks is safe before heading out to cover their tracks and to see what he can find. While sitting in the near dark on her own, Taryn hears some pretty eerie noises, and uncovers a secret from the files about what was happening in the facility before the collapse, leaving her mind racing about what could be lurking elsewhere in the industrial wasteland hell that they’ve chosen as their refuge.

At only eight minutes long, Shelter is barely an introduction into the world which Taryn and Conor now inhabit. All the regular post-society tropes are in there right from the off, so it’s easy to see what we’re getting for the time that we’re there, but it’s difficult to fathom just what has happened and what makes this world different from any of the myriad others that have been represented in films, books, and TV over the years, especially seeing as nothing is even hinted at that might help us guess. The ‘shift’, as Taryn calls it, never gets expanded upon and we just have to accept what kind of situation we’re in with our previous knowledge and experience from other media.

Far from the world being overrun by zombies, however, writer/director Laurence Roberts at least tries to introduce an original adversary, albeit a singular entity, which oozes and creeps about in the dark hallways. This figure is genuinely terrifying in its aspect for the time that we encounter it, but we’re never in the frame with it for long enough to actually know what it is, how it came to be, or how it manifests itself against our plucky heroes. By the time we get introduced to just what the story of the Shelter might actually be, the film’s over and the credits roll and we’re all done.

The cinematography from Stephen Bell and Eric Moniz does a lot of the heavy lifting in Shelter, bringing us into the dark of the hallways and using the pointed light sources in the best way possible. There’s always a crispness to the visuals which helps us find the expressions on the characters faces, which is just as well, because there’s literally nothing else in the film that needs any kind of focus or attention from the viewer. In contrast, the sound is rather tinny and distant, and the dialogue sounds more tacked on top than anything else, pulling the audience out from the scenario somewhat as we go along. The direction, too, from Roberts, works well enough, although until the very last shot of the film there’s nothing much to write home about.

After eight minutes (seven, pre-credits), we haven’t covered very much ground at all in Shelter, and even though most of the post-apocalyptic benchmarks have been hit, almost nothing has actually happened, along with nearly zero explanation given. As a proof of concept, Shelter might work for some in that it at least introduces the idea that it wants to follow, however, if you’re looking for anything beyond that you’re likely to be sorely disappointed.