Shoulders Film Review: Strong Concept but Messy Execution

With a tense set-up and impressive directing, Shoulders starts off on the right foot but ends up missing its mark at times.

Even before watching the movie, I was intrigued by what it might have gone on to explore, but did it manage to deliver on such expectations? Perhaps not entirely. 

Shoulders promised to be a gripping analysis of the internal and external warfare a group of soldiers face when they are sent to a high risk mission in a remote area. At the beginning of the film, eight young soldiers are stationed at the northernmost post with the mission of watching and reporting for enemy invasion. As they take on their task, however, they end up isolated from the main base. Left with no contact from anybody else and with no actual weapon to defend themselves with, the soldiers are forced to find a way to organise the group themselves as they struggle to maintain order and sanity in such circumstances.

From the very beginning of the film, the directing stood out to me the most. While some choices may seem too ambitious – and sometimes out of place – the movie often surprises us and keeps the audience on its toes from a visual point of view. The choice to film in black and white is especially interesting too, proving to be very successful. The colour white is important to the premise of the entire story – white is the colour of the soldiers’ uniforms as well as the colour of the elusive snow they are so desperately trying to find – and choosing a black-and-white aesthetics only reinforces its importance visually.

The acting is particularly fascinating: most of the main characters can showcase their impressive acting ability with intense monologues and emotion-filled moments. Individually, each of the actors in Shoulders is great, but as a group they don’t quite work as well. The relationships between the characters are tense – and only grow more tense during the movie – but there is something missing in the group dynamics that makes the audience less inclined to believe that these people co-exist together organically. 

Unfortunately, the movie fails to deliver the stakes of the entire narrative. As we go into the film, the audience doesn’t really know anything about these characters’ background, or what their lives looked like before the events of the movie took place. This makes it incredibly hard for us to care about or even relate to them at all, especially as we know so little about their identities too. As Shoulders goes on, it becomes hard to differentiate between the various protagonists whose individual personalities and unique characters are only sketched out rather than fully explored.  

This hurts the pace of the film as well, which ends up feeling slower and slower in its second half, when all of its narrative’s most interesting elements have already been revealed. Normally, the third act should be the most exciting, memorable, and gripping, especially in this filmmaking genre, and yet the final act in Shoulders only feels slow and overtly long. Perhaps it partially comes with the very premise of the movie, but I could not help but feel that the film itself did not entirely know where it was going or how to conclude its narrative arcs properly. 

Ultimately, Shoulders is a good movie that could have been a lot more interesting and groundbreaking. While making some excellent choices when it comes to directing and individual acting performances, the film seems to have a storytelling issue that ultimately undermines its entire narrative. It is especially a shame to see it fail as its premise and idea initially seemed fascinating and original to begin with, in an industry that so desperately needs new and fresh ideas. In this sense, it is still a promising debut for Flatters, whose first feature establishes him as an innovative and compelling director.

Shoulders opened the Clapham International Film Festival on 27 November, 2024.