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Shining Vale Series Review: Comedy and horror are quite the difficult elements to mash up. Maintaining that balance of elements can lead to quite the dysfunction and ultimately into a clash of tones. However recently, projects like What We Do in the Shadows and Ghosts have been able to deliver on those fronts without much hassles. Blending the comic elements with that of horror, those series excelled at their premises. So, it was a bit disappointing to see Shining Vale not being able to do that. Shining Vale: Courteney Cox Shares She Completely Relates to Her Character’s Midlife Crisis in New Starz Show.
Created by Jeff Astrof and Sharon Hogan, Shining Vale sees a dysfunctional family buy a new house and move into the small town of Shining Vale after Patricia “Pat” Phelps (Courteney Cox) cheats on her husband Terry Phelps (Greg Kinnear). The series follows Patricia as she starts noticing something quite odd about the house and slowly finds herself being haunted by demons.
Courteney Cox as Pat is quite the casting. Pat is introduced as a depressed author who is trying to complete her new book but can’t as she is going through a writer’s block. Just as she enters the town, she begins to have visions of a small girl and a woman who haunt her and amidst that her possession begins.
Cox’s performance is by far the best part of the series. Her torment is quite well portrayed and some aspects of her character do shine in many cases, although they can be let down by the writing at times. On the other hand, we have Greg Kinnear as Terry Phelps who is trying to get over his wife cheating on him by bottling up his anger and acting like nothing is wrong. At times he loses his cool and might just drop by and visit the guy who his wife cheated on him with, and these instances make for some of the most hilarious scenes in the show.
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To round of the Phelps family, we also have Gus Birney as Gaynor Phelps and Dylan Gage as Jake Phelps. Gaynor is your average teen putting on a farce to impress a rather conservative Christian boy while Jake on the other hand is your nerdy gamer that royally fails at being a social butterfly. To round off, the Phelps family is quite entertaining to watch.
The comedy portions of the show make for a light-hearted watch and often keeps it from feeling like a drag. At times, it doesn’t even feel like a horror show but a straight up funny one. The comedy of Shining Vale is what the series exceeds at and unfortunately causes some of its problems too.
Like previously mentioned, maintaining horror and comedy together can be quite troublesome. You either squash the horror and comedy together, which has proven to work a lot with shows like Ghosts and What We Do in the Shadows, or you keep both the elements differentiated from each other and just excel at one. That’s the problem with Shining Vale. It focuses so much on comedy to the point it fails to acknowledge many of its horror elements.
With doors shutting, floors squeaking and the ghost of a dead woman showing up out of nowhere on your window, Shining Vale almost wants to be a horror show and then pulls back at the final moment. Imagine you’re at the airport and the plane is about to land, but it suddenly takes off again just as it is about to touch the ground. That’s what watching Shining Vale’s horror scenes felt like.
The story here also sees a family move into a house and the mentally distressed wife suddenly starts getting haunted. Like we haven’t seen that already in a dozen of other films and shows. They could truly have done something unique with the concept, and they allude to it as well, but the show never takes off with it.
The first episode of Shining Vale begins with a saying of how women are more likely to be depressed than men and more likely to be possessed as well. You would think with a line like that, there might be an acute look into depression and the show would explore it further, but at its best, it’s just a surface level exploration of the concept. Jurassic World Dominion Movie Review: Chris Pratt and Sam Neill’s Finale is a T-Rex Sized Disappointment With Quite the Convoluted Plot (LatestLY Exclusive).
However, the saving grace of the episodes has to be the way they are paced and stylised. The runtime of the episodes finds a perfect blend into making them not seem like a slog. The cinematography adds a certain flair to some of the episodes. The Dutch angles and the overhead rotating shots make for a visually fun tone that I saw myself getting behind.
Yay!
Courteney Cox as Pat Phelps
The Comedy
Nay!
Surface Level Exploration of Themes
Is Not Scary at All
Final Thoughts
Shining Vale manages to be great comedy show with a horror set-dressing. Reveling in its jokes and awkward interactions, it almost forgets to pay attention to its scares. Fortunately, the runtime of the episodes and crisp cinematography make for a visually fun watch that I quite enjoyed, but don’t plan on returning to soon. Shining Vale is streaming right now on Lionsgate Play.
(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jun 14, 2022 11:47 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).
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