'6 Souls' DVD Review: Thriller In Need Of Suspense

6 Souls (titled Shelter in Europe, where it was originally released three years ago) tells the story of a psychologist named Cara Harding (Julianne Moore) who tries to debunk Adam’s (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) multiple personality disorder as fake. She’s thrown for a loop when she finds that his personalities belong to murder victims with whom he never had contact.

In this slow-paced film, Harding tries to figure out who exactly Adam is, allowing her curiosity to put herself and her vulnerable family in avoidable danger. Harding’s father is murdered by the killer, who turns out to be Meyers’s actual base character – a reverend from generations back who steals people’s souls (it turns out Adam is just another stolen soul). If only Harding hadn’t been so obsessed with the mystery of Adam she could have realized sooner the simple fact that because this man was so integrally tied up in murder, he should probably be kept away from just about everyone. He didn’t need to be walking around for her to figure everything out – she solved the mystery by watching a film of the evil reverend. My question – why didn’t she get her hands on the film sooner and save a lot of trouble, as well as her father’s life?

6 Souls was placed in the genre “horror/thriller,” but to have either title, a movie ought to actually have suspense. By keeping Adam’s truth away from the audience as well as the characters for nearly the entire movie, the viewer is left tired instead of intrigued. If the viewer had been let in on the reveal sooner, the film could have been more interesting and suspenseful as he/she waited for Harding to figure it out as well. Or perhaps it would have been just as annoying – we’ll never know. Instead, aside from emotional stares, moodiness, and dramatic music, this movie lacked even an ounce of anticipation.

But back to that illimitable number of emotional stares – segue scenes such as these laughable looks, as well as many panned landscape shots, seemed to make up at least half the movie. They slowed the film’s pacing down from its already protracted speed and felt like hollow filler for a film that couldn’t make it to the minimum length standard of an hour-and-a-half without it (it only passed that length due to the seemingly dozens of stares and dragged-out credits).

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