Manchevski bathes Shadows in the highly-charged, melodramatic atmosphere and renders the trashier touches with aplomb.
Shadows (2008)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:14
Fresh:8
Rotten:6
Average Rating:5.8/10
Synopsis: A horrendous car-crash changes a young doctor's life forever, putting him in contact with the souls of the dead in SHADOWS. Lazar's recovery from the accident is miraculous, but his trials aren't... A horrendous car-crash changes a young doctor's life forever, putting him in contact with the souls of the dead in SHADOWS. Lazar's recovery from the accident is miraculous, but his trials aren't over. These itinerant spirits have an important message, and in order to meet their demands, Lazar will have to look within. Milcho Manchevski (BEFORE THE RAIN) directs this moving Macedonian drama. [More]
Starring: Borce Nacev, Vesna Stanojevska, Sabina Ajrula-Tozija, Salaetin Bilal
Starring: Borce Nacev, Vesna Stanojevska, Sabina Ajrula-Tozija, Salaetin Bilal, Ratka Radmanovic, Filareta Atanasova, Dime Iliev, Vladimir Jacev
Director: Milcho Manchevski
Director: Milcho Manchevski
Producer: Milcho Manchevski, Amedeo Pagani, Corinna Mehner, Nermin Gladers, Martin Husmann, Dimitar Gochev, Gerardo Herrero, Mariela Besuievsky
Reviews for Shadows
Milcho Manchevski's Shadows is visually striking but gets bogged down in supernatural clichés.
A hauntingly frightening, clever and surprisingly poignant psychological horror film.
An exercise overly rooted in American genre filmmaking while never sufficiently mainstreaming the European context in a way that would break out to more commercial stateside distribution.
A soulful Macedonian movie about a physician whose quest for meaning enables him to take responsibility for a terrible family secret and to come to terms with his lust for life.
A respectable enough little ghost story, but it loses a lot of sparkle by being similar to such other guy-talks-to-the-dead thrillers as The Sixth Sense and Ghost Town.
Shifting between garish city and bucolic scenes, Shadows offers some arresting images but fails to make good on its intriguing early scenes, with frissons of uncanny menace sunk by a glib, awkwardly paced and increasingly cliché screenplay.
Shadows presents the old superstition vs. rationality argument with sociological undercurrents and more than a few surrealistic touches.
[The] two very attractive leads, Mr. Nacev and Ms. Stanojevska, were picked out of a pool of aspirants in Macedonia and its neighboring countries. Actually, they are so arresting together that it is truly unearthly.
The charm of Manchevski's film clearly lies in its ability to embrace its eccentricities and pull together a number of disparate ideas into what's generally a satisfying thriller.
If not for the hypnotic atmosphere, lush cinematography, and frequent, if random, softcore humping, we'd have seen these ghosts before.
Though overlong, the picture by 'Before the Rains' director Milcho Manchevski, is graced with stunning photography, spooky imagery, and a moralist's hand.
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