Fantasia 2024 Review: SHELBY OAKS, A Rock Solid Fright Film From First Time Director Chris Stuckmann

Twelve years ago, YouTuber Riley Brennan went missing. When, after a long dry spell, a seemingly related tragedy lands on the doorstep of her sister Mia, the rescue mission restarts in debutante director Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks.

Chris Stuckmann is one of the biggest names in the emerging landscape of video-based film criticism that has exploded over the last five or so years. Many of these film commentators are content to exist in the reaction/analysis space, but Stuckmann has made it clear that his dream is creation, and that dream comes to fruition with his first feature, Shelby Oaks. Produced by the veteran indie champions at Paper Street Pictures (The Artifice Girl, Scare Package, Trim Season), Shelby Oaks is an ambitious film whose reach occasionally exceeds its grasp, but everything it does it does with impeccable style.

Riley Brennan (Sarah Durn) was the host of the Paranormal Paranoids YouTube channel. In the mythology of the film, this show existed just as YouTube was exploding, making it a pioneering example of YT fame. They explored haunted spots in and around their midwestern homes with remarkable results, but one trip to the ghost town of Shelby Oaks spelled the end of the show, and most of the Paranoids team, in 2008. In the dozen years since their unsolved disappearance, the world had moved on, except for Mia (Camille Sullivan), Riley’s big sister.

When a mysterious man shows up at her doorstep and proclaims, “She finally let me leave”, before shooting himself in the head, Mia knows that the hunt for her sister must resume. Against her husband’s wishes – he just wants to leave the past in the past – Mia sets out to find Riley, but what she finds is a million times more sinister than anyone could have imagined.

Beginning with a twenty-minute found footage prologue, Shelby Oaks immediately establishes that the audience is in for a wild ride. Frequent cutting between archival footage from the Paranoids show, numerous news reports, and modern-day documentary footage serves as the audience’s primer for the chaos to come. However, Shelby Oaks isn’t a found-footage film, at least not really. It’s a twisty folk horror thriller… kind of… overflowing with ideas, homages, and that distinct feeling that comes from first time filmmakers, the feeling that they may as well throw everything at the wall to see what sticks because who knows if they’ll ever get another chance.

There’s not a lot in Shelby Oaks that we haven’t seen before; in fact, the film borrows so blatantly from a million other successful indie horror films of the last twenty-five years, that a list of influences might actually be too spoilery. However, Stuckmann is very adept at taking pieces from all of these films that he clearly loves and assembling them into something truly engaging. He benefits greatly from his technical team, especially Andrew Scott Baird (Scare Package) behind the camera doing career-best work and composers The Newton Brothers (Doctor Sleep) who bring their A-game to this relatively small film.

We see the entire convoluted story of Shelby Oaks through Mia’s eyes, and Camille Sullivan’s deeply committed performance forgives some of the more questionable directorial choices. Channeling the same primal energy as Toni Collette in Hereditary and Essie Davis in The Babadook, Sullivan carries Shelby Oaks on her very capable shoulders. For about sixty percent of the film, she’s the only on-screen character, and the camera eats her up. She chomps her way through the occasional odd production design or awkward direction to maintain the viewer’s sympathy all the way through this genuinely chilling film.

What deficits there are will depend on the audience’s willingness to suspend logic. Many of the locations are decrepit and deserted, but perhaps not exactly in alignment with the timeline we are provided. The character of Mia spends hours upon hours with someone else’s blood on her face with easy access to a washroom for no discernible reason. These aren’t plot holes – I don’t subscribe to that pedestrian mode of criticism – but they do render the internal logic of the film occasionally specious, which would be perfectly fine if the film leaned into it, but Shelby Oaks seems to want to play things straight, and that’s where some minor cracks start to show.

Newer genre fans will likely respond to Shelby Oaks with big smiles on their faces. It’s a very well-made film, with plenty of clever twists and turns and no real lulls in the increasingly complex narrative. Longtime genre film fans will walk out of Shelby Oaks with plenty to say – I’d wager the mostly positive – however, there’s so much very recognizable homage to horror’s last quarter century, that the film is bound to invite comparison, and that could end up being sticky. Nevertheless, Shelby Oaks is a gorgeously realized film with rock solid performances and enough genuine scares to satisfy genre fans.