Night Visions: Shadowland

I like to think I've got a good bullshit detector. After many difficult years of living with undiagnosed autism, I have to. It keeps me sane and alive.

So when I felt it go wildly off the rails as Richard Stanley, disgraced director, and alleged abuser, stepped on screen in Shadowland, I knew I was about to go into dark and uncomfortable territory.

He appears in a wardrobe befitting a live-action roleplayer: Robes, a staff, tacky jewelry, and a floppy hat. Around him is the French Pyrenees – heaven on earth. Whether it's a projection or not, his presence here feels invasive. Like a dark envoy from the fantasy novels that he attempts to emulate.

He claims to have seen The White Lady, a local deity, and leads a broken group of true believers to a cause that is flimsy at best. Stanley calls the region as the Zone. An elusive area where magic and reality meet. A place where people can heal.

It's horseshit, of course. A mishmash of New Age spiritualism and the films Stanley devours. It isn't even original, just things that he co-opted upon arrival.

Yet people are drawn to him, and he is a magnetic presence. He towers above others, and his voice booms with unearned confidence. Those who attach themselves to him are broken in their own ways. Not everyone buys into the charade, and it's fascinating to see how different sects of this new community drift apart.

Shadowland did not begin as a study of Stanley, the monster, but rather of Stanley, the director on the verge of a comeback. Midway through the shoot, former partners came forth with horrific allegations of abuse, and the documentary changed along with them.

While we can't see what the film looked like before the event, I'd argue that what is there indicates even the filmmakers knew something was off. You can almost see the moment their bullshit detectors go off as Stanley preaches his manipulative jargon.

Directed by Otso Tiainen, who co-wrote the script with producer Kalle Kinnunen, Shadowland is a smart and eloquent film that is as introspective as it is revealing. It is a dialog between material and subject that understands its part in the larger narrative that is Stanley, his accusers, and the audience.

A lesser film would stay back and push on with its original premise. Shadowland does the opposite. It questions the reasons that drew the filmmakers to the Pyrenees in the first place. It has the self-awareness to wonder if it, too, fell spellbound in this alluring mysticism.

In one of the most devastating scenes, the filmmakers confront a true believer with evidence of Stanley's actions, and witness how the world they've constructed falls apart. To their credit, Tiainen and Kinnunen are not exploitative nor sensationalist. Their work is tender and empathetic. At every turn you feel that they want to understand – which is at the heart of every good documentary.

This is an atmospheric, moody, and visually resplendent film. It deserves a theatrical experience. The crew understands that to communicate how a single location can hypnotize people so deeply, we must immerse ourselves into every aspect of it. Tiainen's lens probes rituals, baths, long walks in the idyllic countryside, and the dwellings of those who've made it their home. By the end, I couldn't help but love this place in turn. Even though I've never set foot there.

But this is not a travel brochure. Instead, a melancholy air hangs over every frame. As if the filmmakers mourn our very presence here. It's not hard to see why. As the revelations come one after another, others join in the lamentations. Like all religious tales, we come to understand how such a paradise can only be ruined by those who pilgrimage there.

Tiainen and company do not prod or provoke. They watch and allow those on-camera to talk themselves into either self-awareness or deeper delusion. Both come with a sense of heartbreak. In the end, it is life wasted, to some degree, on a lie. Breaking away from it reveals how much was lost. Plunging in deeper is easier, yet no less devastating.

Shadowland pinned me to my seat. It captures the nuances of the human heart, yet never pretends to understand nor reductively explain them. We don't know why Stanley is the way he is, nor why broken people will continue to wander in search of another poisonous well to drink from. Like other great documentaries about the human experience, Shadowland captures a moment in time and allows us to share it.

It is a rich and powerful documentary that stands proudly alongside films like Heart of Darkness and Burden of Dreams as an ethereal and revelatory introspection on life, faith, filmmaking, and abuse that becomes a part of us and never lets go.