Shelter is a very disappointing supernatural horror film that promised a lot from its opening 20 minutes with a creepy performance from Jonathon Rhys Meyers and an interesting take on schizophrenia but it all ended up as a ridiculous mess that was nowhere as clever as it thinks it is.

The story comes from the pen of Michael Cooney who also wrote the very enjoyable John Cusack/Ray Liotta vehicle “Identity” and it’s a very similar in dealing with multiple personalities and murder but unlike Identity the pay off is not as satisfying or easy to accept which is a huge shame. Cooney is also the writer director of the hilarious cult horror movie Jack Frost (The horror one, not the vomit inducing family one) and although it’s classed as a “Horror” film I’m not sure it can be tagged as one which is similar to what this movie is being portrayed as.

Julianne Moore plays Cara, a single mother whose husband was murdered a few years previous leaving her to raise their young daughter alone and having a strong belief in religion that rules her way of thinking both professionally and scientifically. It’s her belief in god that is tested when her work as a criminal psychiatrist leads her to be introduced, by her father, to a wheel chair bound and apparent schizophrenic case David (Rhys Meyers), he seems normal and Cara’s interviewing goes to plan showing no signs of a multiple personality.

Things take a sinister turn when Cara’s father calls David on the interview room phone and asks for someone named Adam which triggers a pretty freaky sounding physical change in David to a completely different personality called Adam a more dominant character with different memories, accent, mannerisms and one that can now stand. Cara investigates these two characters stories and starts to unearth a disappointing plot. Adam starts to reveal further personalities and it’s “Adam’s” condition that causes Clare to question both her scientific and religious beliefs when his other personalities turn out to all be murder victims and when they take the shape of people close to her Cara has to find the true identity of Adam before it claims and kills her daughter.

Shelter has a similar feel to The Ring films with an impending mysterious unseen spiritual killer murdering its way through the victims but the “twist” explanation just doesn’t work for me. As soon as the supernatural element comes into play the film becomes tiresome and the acting becomes dull as what made it interesting with the multiple personalities resonating from one character soon becomes a terrible cliched horror film adding little to its promise at the start.

Overall it’s a very interesting idea and again Cooney shows a very original story which unfortunately fails to meet the promise that Identity showed on its release, the terrible conclusion based slightly around souls being taken from the body and held in a “Shelter” container is nonsense and a real let down adding a quickly explained explanation to sum things up. The film started off very creepily with Rhys Meyers putting in a varied performance that wasn’t too convincing in the multiple personalities but definitely added a scary presence in his change from each character that was helped with some excellent impacting sound fx but it was short lived and apart from some jumps here and there I couldn’t have been less scared.

Julianne Moore was solid as ever and the other cast added a well rounded performance to move the story on with some nice camera shots and clever editing but in the end it just left me feeling empty, bored and with my final roll of the eyes with the closing shot completely unfulfilled.

Shelter is out on 9th April.