Watch Full Movie: Refuge
Director: Renny Harlin
Cast: Jason Flemyng, Sophie Simnett, Aston McAuley
Refuge Review
Refuge is a possession horror movie about an American soldier who brings something evil back home with him from his time in action. While deployed in Afghanistan, Sergeant Rick Pedroni (Aston McAuley) has a fateful encounter with a mysterious force hidden inside a cave. He is sent home, and his wife Kate (Sophie Simnett) and father (Jason Flemyng) are told that Rick is suffering from PTSD. But Kate starts to suspect that Rick’s silence and sudden bursts of aggression are supernatural in origin, so she turns to Ibrahim (Raza Jeffrey), the Imam of a local mosque, for help.
Refuge isn’t bad. It’s perfectly passable entertainment. That isn’t a resounding endorsement for the film, but it is accurate for a movie this glaringly average.
Refuge does certain things very well. The one thing that should immediately be apparent when watching is how good the movie looks. The production design is excellent, and it is all lit extremely well. Even most of the darker scenes are lit in ways that aren’t necessarily realistic, but are visually interesting and a welcome change from some of the more drab and colorless trends in modern filmmaking. In that way, the visual style of Refuge is a bit of a throwback to the late-90s, early-2000s era of mid-budget horror.
There is also a good story somewhere within Refuge. Telling a story about PTSD through the metaphor of possession is straightforward, yet it also has the potential to be effective. All the right elements are there. Prejudice, racism, mental health, and recovery are all touched on, and it’s all structured well within the story. So why isn’t Refuge anything more than just average?
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