6 Souls is a 2010 film that was originally entitled Shelter. But calling it that gives away a key element of the plot.
10 out of 10 stars. This is one of my all-time favorite scary movies.
The film begins with famous Dr. Cara Harding giving private testimony to the governor on a death row pedophile murderer who is about to be executed. He’s been given one last shot at a psychological assessment and Dr. Harding tells the governor in great detail why the murderer does not have multiple personality disorder and how it was a fad that was never proven. That sets up the plot beautifully because she’s about to become a believer.
When she gets home her father, also a famous psychologist, asks her to see a patient, Adam Saber. She interviews him a clinical setting and gives him a few tests. Afterward, while she’s discussing Adam behind a one way mirror with her dad, her father calls the phone in the room with Adam and asks to speak to David. And right before our eyes we see the physical change from Adam to David Bernburg. His neck cracks and bends, his mouth opens in a freakish way, and he changes into David, who is crippled with a broken back. Further tests reveal that one of them is color blind; the other is not. One of them can walk; the other cannot. They have completely different personalities and memories. And the facts they are recounting are real and verifiable. Furthermore, when x-rays are taken of David they show the broken vertebrae in his back, but the x-rays of Adam show no broken vertebrae.
Now Cara is intrigued and plunges down the rabbit hole into another world of backwoods religion, the devil, God, and faith. She starts this journey by finding out who David Bernburg was before he died and that leads her to the back country where faith and medicine are practiced in a very different way. And where evil is punished.
SPOILERS: One of the keys to this plot is faith. Cara is deeply religious, a Catholic, but two years ago her husband was killed in a mugging on Christmas so her daughter Sammy has lost her faith. In fact, the loss of faith is the one thing all of the personalities have in common. Only they are not personalities. They are souls trapped in the same body taking “shelter”. What Cara eventually discovers is that the body of Adam and David and the other four personalities is actually that of a 1920s faith healing reverend, Christian Moore, who was punished by the backwoods granny by casting his soul from his body and making his body a vessel for all the unfaithful souls. In the very end, he claims Sammy’s soul and in an effort to get her daughter back, Cara kills the reverend’s body. Unfortunately the souls are then forced to use Sammy’s body.
Scariest line: “Reverend Christian Moore, shelter now the faithless.”
10 out of 10 stars. Don’t watch this alone. If you are at all religious it will terrify you.
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