Movie Review: SHAMAN

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: August 8th, 2025 / 08:26 PM

SHAMAN movie poster | ©2025 Well Go USA Entertainment

Rating: R
Stars: Sara Canning, Daniel Gillies, Jett Klyne, Humberto Morales, Alejandro Fajardo, Mercy Lema, Segundo Fuérez
Writer: Daniel Negret
Director: Antonio Negret
Distributor: Well Go USA Entertainment
Release Date: August 8, 2025

Set and shot in Ecuador, SHAMAN pits Catholicism against indigenous religion.

Married American missionaries Candice (Sara Canning) and Joel Williams (Daniel Gillies) have moved with their young son Elliot (Jett Klyne) to a small Ecuadoran village. They are involved here in teaching, putting up buildings and helping grow crops.

Along with Father Meyer (Alejandro Fajardo), Candice and Joel are also active in proselytizing and converting the locals. Most of the villagers are grateful for the Church’s enhancements to the village in terms of food, medicine and education. A few even seem enthusiastic about baptism.

But there are locals who do not live in the village, including the Shaman (Humberto Morales) and his apprentice Atok (Segundo Fuérez). Atok is outraged at the presence of the Catholic outsiders, seeing them essentially as the heirs of the conquistadors who stole ancestral lands centuries earlier. The Shaman is more tolerant.

The village children and the Shaman both try to warn Elliot away from a particular cave. But Elliot goes in anyway. After Elliot emerges, an old woman immediately detects a change in the boy. Soon, it’s visible to all.

But when the Shaman tries to tell Candice and Joel what’s wrong with their child, Candice is incensed and Joel keeps saying, “We don’t believe in that.”

In SHAMAN, “we don’t believe in that” is directed at pre-Christian religion, but it’s easy to see it as a metaphor for other issues like (to name just one) climate change, where insistence on specific religious doctrine harms everyone, whether they believe in it or not.

Director Antonio Negret and writer Daniel Negret play with this notion a lot. Candice and Joel can be destructive even when it’s completely inadvertent on their part. There are also questions about which actions come out of genuine faith and which are a pretense of faith to cover a desire for control.

Canning gives Candice a down-to-earth warmth that makes it easy for us to accept how much the villagers like and trust her. Klyne offers both naturalistic youth and terrifying otherness. Gillies does well as the increasingly dismayed Joel. Fuérez is passionate as Atok, and Morales embodies authority, wisdom and sorrow as the Shaman.

SHAMAN is not without its flaws. There are some scenes that go for relatively standard, albeit properly alarming, exorcism fare. Even though we comprehend what the filmmakers are telling us, some characters remain stubborn too long for credibility in the face of what they (and we) see.

Finally, the ending produces a refrigerator moment of wondering why a certain result is preferable to another for one of two parties involved in a crucial decision.

Still, SHAMAN provides us with grounded-feeling, fresh mythology in a locale seldom visited in movies. It also uses big, real-world problems as logical backdrops for a strong horror story.

In English, Spanish, and Kichwa.

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Catholicism vs. a malevolent indigenous deity in contemporary Ecuador

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