In the very much not so distant future, the recently formed United States of Europe head for a presidential election. The incumbent president is facing a tough re-election battle which turns even more difficult when his campaign manager is murdered. That man’s niece is trying to uncover the truth and get her revenge.
And somehow lots of werewolves are involved for no particular reason.
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I finally got my hands on a copy of Among the Shadows, and it is far more boring than I could have ever imagined. I expected a cheap, off-brand Underworld. What I got was a hapless, confused political thriller with vampires and werewolves shoehorned into.
Fittingly, the film (which for a long time was sticking to its working title The Shadow Within) starts with a stylistically confused opening which makes me believe that several people tinkered with it or gave the editors “studio notes”. The film starts with two or three glimpses of an explosion; they have no context to them, do not feel like they are someone’s flashback (as such opening fragments often are), and they overall feel too short to make sense of. Later we learn that these are events that have not even happened yet. Then we see lots of shots of graveyards and of church windows. These shots are very well made, but I don’t know if any of them are simply stock footage. An audio track of a funeral sermon is laid over these shots, but not intended to sound like a funeral that is currently happening off-screen. The audio sounds like someone’s memory, and somehow it does not fit the shots. Then we move on to an urban landscape, with a nice aerial shot of a night-time city (presumable stock footage), which is preceded by a very artificially looking full moon.
So while the opening is of good visual quality overall, it feels aimless and there is a complete lack of a coherent stylistic vision. It extends throughout the film, with slick aerial cityscape shots and gothic graveyard shots being dropped in repeatedly, as if the filmmakers knew of no other way to transition from one scene to the next.
There are also a huge number of night-time shots of buildings or streets, mostly in Paris and Brussels, that leave you completely lost. You feel like they are supposed to establish something, but you don’t know what. You never feel like you know where we are, or how much time has passed. The same goes for the many shots of politicians and aides walking through buildings, or in and out of buildings.
I should add that the good visual and aesthetic quality only extends to the “filler” images that are unconnected to the story, i. e. the graveyard images and aerial shots just mentioned. By contrast, almost every scene involving actual characters looks horribly cheap, dark, and bland.
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The stylistic confusion finds its counterpart in the muddled plot itself. It is a political thriller in which nothing ever makes sense. The general premise is clear, as is the third act twist, but everything else related to the plot remains a big gaping hole.
So the whole project seems to me like it was doomed from the start. The writers failed at a task that was at once the most difficult as well as the most basic of the entire project: making politics interesting. If you want to make a political thriller, the politics has to thrill. In this film, it doesn’t. You see a lot of people talking about “stuff”, but none of it makes sense. The writers just gave them some political jargon to spout. At no point does the audience know what is going on, and neither do the actors.
The film also has almost nothing to offer in terms of special or practical effects. Stylistically it seems to go for a bland, gritty crime story; and every time our anti-hero shows up – a female P.I. with an alcohol problem (played by Charlotte Beckett) – the film tries to pull off a noir tone, with limited success.
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I am really not sure how this was pitched, but it seems like they tried to sell it as House of Cards meets Underworld. And here is another problem: if you are so determined to write a political thriller, you could just do that and leave vampires and werewolves out of it. These are two genres that do not easily mingle, and you’d need at least a Kindred-style TV-show to make it work. Amongst the Shadows has very shoddy world-building: you never learn about the history of these werewolves or vampires nor anything about how their societies may work. And there is not a single character that you would really get to know or that is developed properly. There are far too many characters anyway, and since they take screen-time away from each other almost all of them can only be classed as minor supporting characters.
With the filmmakers failing at the minimum requirements for interesting plot, characters, or world-building, there was no way this difficult genre-mash could ever work.
Talking about the world-building: From the outside, this film looks and feels like a European co-production, but watching it you quickly gain the impression that the filmmakers do not know the first thing about Europe. All the political mechanisms, the news coverage, etc., everything is moulded in a US style. The “First Lady” even drives an insanely long, white US stretch-limousine through Paris, even though they hardly exist in Europe and no European politician would ever be seen dead in a tasteless thing like that.
Add to that the fact that the characters talk about “the European police” as if they themselves were not European.
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For me it seems clear that the filmmakers undertook a project that was way too ambitious, and then they spent the rest of the production trying to play catch-up with their own ambitions yet never even came close to fulfilling them. The fact that neither writer Mark Morgan nor director Tiago Mesquita have much experience in these roles may partially explain this misjudged enterprise.
With the world-building not working, the characters staying unknown entities, and the plot making no sense, what you are left with in this film is a lot of death and mayhem, but none of it is exciting and most of it is poorly choreographed and even more poorly shot. Throughout the film you feel that a lot is happening, but at the same time you feel that nothing is happening. And whatever is happening is not explained, and it is not presented in a way that would make you feel that any of it matters.
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The film has caused some curiosity online, because it is one of the few projects Lindsay Lohan has done in recent years. Lohan’s performance in this film, in a major supporting role, is adequate but it is clear that she was mostly green-screened into this film. At any rate, not one of the problems in this film is her fault. The lead actress, Charlotte Beckett, also gives a valiant performance and tries her best to giver her character some depth; but with material like this she had lost the battle against the script before filming even started. The rest of the actors try to be professional, but it is clear that they are as confused as we are, and they merely stand on their mark and deliver their lines hoping in vain that it will all make sense after editing. The only actor who gets through this film with some dignity is Olivier Bonjour, thanks to his significant screen presence.
A time-span of 3 years between filming and release may not be that unusual for independent films that often secure post-production financing via distribution deals. But with 29 producer credits, and at least 7 different people directly involved with the editing, you still cannot help but wonder what exactly was going on behind the scenes.
I would rate this film at 2.0 to 2.5 out of 10.
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PS: The Italian Blu-Ray offers no bonus material and provides only Italian subtitles. Since the film is a jumble of accents, mumbled lines, and poor general sound quality (often thanks to “telepathy echoes”), there were many scenes in which I definitely missed an English subtitles option dearly.
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