Netflix's IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON (2019) Review

In The Shadow of the Moon is a Netflix original film that is actually one of the more intriguing creations to come out of the streaming service.

"In 1988, a police officer is hungry to become a detective and begins tracking a serial killer who strikes every nine years. But when the killer's crimes defy all scientific explanation, the officer's obsession threatens to destroy everything."

The film stars Boyd Holbrook, Cleopatra Coleman, Bokeem Woodbine, Michael C. Hall and Rudi Dharmalingam and is directed by Jim Mickle (Hap and Leonard, Cold in July, and a few other titles I've never heard of).

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The film starts off in 1988, where a few truly mysterious murders take place all over the city in close approximation in time to each other.

The wanna be street cops who want to make detective, Locke and Maddox (Holbrook and Woodbine), insert themselves where they're not wanted, all in the efforts of becoming detective. Locke is pretty insightful which helps point detectives on the case in the right direction.

But the murders only occur on this one night.

Eight years later, Locke and Maddox are now detectives, and once again the murders happen again. Locke goes back to the old case files and figures out a few things and gets closer to anticipating the murderer to some degree, but the patterns of the murderers victims still don't make sense.

Then again, another eight years pass and they cross paths yet again.

Each time they meet, slightly more is revealed about our murderer, but not enough to satisfy the viewer.

And it goes from there...

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What little I knew sort of prepared me for how the story comes around, but had I hit up this film blind, I probably would have loved the twist of the third act. And as the movie progresses, things sort of start to make sense, but do they?

The third act pretty much blows it out of the water for you, but before that, it's a great little mystery film of who/how and the interactions between our primary characters help confuse/drive the mystery of the story for most of the first two acts.

All in all, I was engaged enough to follow it through and the end just had to be properly explained for it all to make sense.

Watch it if you come across it! I think you may like it. Not to mention, it helps when you're staring at the Netflix menu, scrolling around and instead, have a specific title target to look for!

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