Los Angeles police detective John Cain (Scott Glenn) is suffering heavily under the circumstances of his divorce. He’s clearly depressed, and so hollow inside he is barely able to function in his job. His boss, not unsympathetic to Cain’s psychological plight, believes that getting a change of air would be just the right thing, so he sends Cain off to fetch a murder suspect arrested on a Navajo reservation. The reservation police under Frank Totsoni (Robert Beltran) suspects the man, one Nakai Twobear (Benjamin Bratt), to be guilty of some murders in their jurisdiction as well, but they don’t have the amount of evidence the LA cops have for their murders. They don’t seem completely unhappy to let Cain drive off with the man, anyway, for as we will soon enough learn, they believe Twobear to be a coyote man or skin walker.
There may very well be something to that idea, for Cain gets into a very curious accident while transporting the suspect through the desert, the sort of thing that suggests magic. Unless one doesn’t believe in such a thing like our protagonist, of course. But then, he has a point in so far as his own psychological state could very well cause a man to drive off a road. In any case, Twobear uses the accident to escape, taking with him Cain’s gun and badge, and some of the last bits of the man’s self-respect.
Cain hasn’t quite given up on himself, though, and decides to take an active part in arresting Twobear again, even if it means travelling through the desert with Totsoni, tracking expert Ray Whitesinger (Angela Alvarado) and a small posse. Obviously, Cain will have to confront his own failures and his psychological breaking points, and may very well need to rethink what he believes about magic and how the world functions.
The 90s were a point in time when a good handful of – predominantly white – not Native American filmmakers started making more serious attempts at films that take place on somewhat realistic depictions of reservations, usually featuring an honest interest in – typically Navajo – parts of their cultures and beliefs. For some of today’s tastes, this will of course smack of “cultural appropriation” but watching a film like Shadowhunter, I can’t help but find the attempts at portraying parts of Native American cultures genuine and honest. How correct director J.S. Cardone everything gets is most probably (I’m not an expert on Navajo culture, either) up to discussion, but then, the way for example Catholic exorcisms are portrayed in horror movies made by not always Catholic filmmakers isn’t exactly authentic, either. When in doubt, a filmmaker will change things to work better in a film; thrillers don’t have to follow the rules of the documentary.
Anyway, the film at hand is usually called an action film, but if one goes into it looking for many punch-ups and shoot-outs, or Scott Glenn ripping off his shirt to scream while shooting a machine gun, one will be sorely disappointed, for Cardone uses the old evergreen plot about a man and his companions chasing after a potentially supernatural threat to explore Cain’s brittle interior life, and how he comes to a kind of faith and a reawakening belief in himself and perhaps in others, while Twobear very literally attempts to fill the emptiness inside Cain with his own evil. So expect a lot of loosely paced scenes of people trekking and riding through the desert, dream sequences and explorative dialogue before any action happens. The climactic confrontation is pretty great, mind you, because Cardone is certainly an old pro at suspense and budget action, but it is also the outward culmination of Cain’s inner struggles. All of this works very well indeed thanks to Cardone’s intelligent and calm script and some fine performances by Glenn and Alvarado, and Bratt managing to project Evil and menace throughout (perhaps even when he’s not on screen, which does take some doing).
Shadowhunter is also a fine example of how to keep the supernatural in a film ambiguous without getting ridiculous about it. There’s nothing here that couldn’t be explained through Cain’s mental state and the fear of a man quite as destructive as Twobear is. Yet reading everything that happens through a supernatural lens makes complete sense as well, which to me seems a surprisingly good portrayal of how different frameworks of looking at the factual world can draw very different conclusions from the same facts.
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