The Shade

I hurt myself today

Note: Delayed half-a-day due to Christmas and delayed a few weeks after the film’s release due to ineptness — mine — here are my thoughts on The Shade. The movie is available on demand from streaming services including those listed at the end.

“Shade” can mean a lot of things, from a crime or sin whose commission hangs over a family to a curse cast over generations and fed by the belief in it passed down from father to son, mother to daughter. For the Beckmans it’s nothing more or less than a legacy of dysfunction — bad choices, wrong decisions, multigenerational darkness that’s become a given. Nothing good happens to a Beckman and when it does, there’s sure to be bad coming down the line to ruin it.

Years ago, the now 20-year-old Ryan Beckman (Chris Galust) witnessed his father’s gruesome suicide in the local cemetery. Dad poured gasoline on the headstone of patriarch Randall Beckman (1969-2021), lit it on fire and then shot himself in the heart before collapsing to burn in an impromptu pyre ... and that’s before we even get to the cloaked figures who silently converge on the scene — at least in Ryan’s nightmare-memory. Ryan’s mother, nurse Renee (the formidable Tony Award-winner and five-time nominee Laura Benanti, who brings it in her every scene), is doing her best to hold things together, but Ryan is the one shouldering much of the responsibility for looking after his 9-year-old brother, Jamie (Sam Duncan). Ryan manages to do this while also attending the local community college and apprenticing at a tattoo parlor — he’s a talented artist, so pushing ink could be a genuine career — and delivering pizzas. Constructively, he’s getting therapy and he has a lovely girlfriend (the excellent Mariel Molino) in whom he can safely confide his mental-health issues. But for all that, he’s sure-as-shit still carrying a heavy emotional load for someone so young.