# In the Shadow of the Moon (2019 film)

In the Shadow of the Moon is a 2019 American science fiction thriller film. Directed by Jim Mickle and written by Gregory Weidman and Geoff Tock, it stars Boyd Holbrook, Cleopatra Coleman, and Michael C. Hall. It had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 21, 2019, before it was released on Netflix on September 27, 2019.

## Plot

In 1988 in Philadelphia, several people simultaneously hemorrhage with their brains seemingly having melted out of their facial orifices. Police officer Thomas Lockhart and his partner, Maddox, investigate the case with Lockhart's brother-in-law, Detective Holt. Lockhart concludes that the deaths are connected when he finds similar puncture wounds on each victim. Lockhart and Maddox find an assault victim with the same wounds; before dying, she describes her assailant as a black woman with a wounded hand. Lockhart and Maddox find the suspect and chase her into a subway, where she subdues Maddox. When Lockhart confronts her, the suspect reveals details about his life, including that his wife will give birth that day to a girl. She predicts her own death just prior to a struggle, which ends with a train striking and crushing her. Although confused about the many unexplained details, the police close the case. Meanwhile, Lockhart's wife dies in childbirth.
Nine years later in 1997, an apparent copycat begins another killing spree. Lockhart, now a detective caring for his young daughter Amy, and Holt, now a lieutenant, can find no apparent motive or connection between the victims. Lockhart retrieves keys found on the subway suspect in 1988 to an aircraft manufactured in 1996. Naveen Rao, a physicist, insists this is proof of time travel enabled by a lunar epiphany every nine years, but Maddox and Lockhart ignore him. After tracking the copycat to an airfield, Lockhart is shocked to find the same suspect from 1988, who is alive and has not aged. She unintentionally kills Maddox and takes Lockhart hostage, again revealing knowledge about his life she could not know. She takes him with her on board of a small aircraft, warns him to never look for her again, and pushes him out of the plane into the sea before crashing on a nearby shore.
In 2006, Lockhart is now an alcoholic, disturbed private investigator obsessed with solving the case, which he now believes involves time travel and Dr. Rao, who has disappeared. The teenage Amy lives with Holt, and Lockhart maintains only occasional contact with her. Lockhart discovers a previously unrecorded victim from the 1988 murders and visits the victim's wife, who reveals her husband ran a white nationalist militia group. Lockhart meets Holt and advances the theory that the suspect is moving back in time as they are moving forward, killing each member of the terrorist group, but Holt dismisses the theory and insists Lockhart get psychiatric help. Lockhart steals Holt's badge, uses it to impersonate a police officer, and tracks down the former girlfriend of the white nationalist leader, who was even more extremist, arriving at her home to find she has been murdered by the suspect, who is still in the house. Lockhart chases the suspect and wounds her hand with a bullet, follows her to the beach where the plane had crashed and into a sewage hole, where he sees her disappear in what is construed to be a time machine. As he comes out of the tunnel, Lockhart is arrested by Holt as an unseen Rao watches.
In 2015, while waiting for the woman on the beach, Lockhart listens to a voice message from Amy asking him to come to the birth of her child. He is suddenly kidnapped by Rao. Rao admits to developing the technology the woman uses to kill her victims, an injection whose effects can be remotely triggered through time. He says her cause is justified, and that she is killing only those who inspired the perpetrators of a terrible tragedy. Lockhart escapes from Rao and confronts the woman — who reveals herself as Rya, Amy's daughter and his granddaughter, born that very same day.
She explains that many years later, Lockhart convinces an adult Rya to take the mission after the militia group's terrorism triggered a new civil war in 2024, when she was only nine. Rya is traveling backwards in time, appearing every nine years in reverse chronological order in phase with lunar epiphanies, injecting her targets in the back of the neck with a remotely triggered isotope. From her perspective, the events of 2006 have yet to occur, and her hand is not yet wounded. Overcome with guilt over causing his own granddaughter's death, Lockhart acknowledges that he killed her in 1988. Convinced that her cause is just, he lets her complete her mission, the only way for her to survive, eventually. After Rya's departure into the past, an elderly Rao triggers the injections, killing Rya's targets and erasing the terrorist attack and subsequent civil war from the timeline. In 2015, Lockhart reunites with his family and embraces a chance at a new future with his newborn granddaughter.

## Cast

* Boyd Holbrook as Thomas Lockhart
* Cleopatra Coleman as Rya
* Bokeem Woodbine as Maddox
* Rudi Dharmalingam as Naveen Rao
* Rachel Keller as Jean
* Michael C. Hall as Holt
* Sarah Dugdale as Amy (18/27)
* Quincy Kirkwood as Amy (9)
* Philippa Domville as Arlene
* Tony Nappo as Clark

## Production

The project was announced in February 2018, with Jim Mickle directing and Boyd Holbrook set to star in the lead role. The film would be produced and distributed by Netflix. In June 2018, Michael C. Hall joined the cast of the film. In July 2018, Cleopatra Coleman and Bokeem Woodbine joined the cast.
Speaking about the project, director Mickle declared:
   “Gregory [Weidman] and Geoff’s [Tock] script is such a great mind bender and beautifully weaves together all my favorite genres, Boyd [Holbrook] is going to eat this role alive and show why he’s one of the best young actors working today. We’re lucky to have an incredibly talented producing team and a home like Netflix that’s excited to take chances. Any studio that makes Okja has a permanent place in my heart.”
Principal production commenced on July 2, 2018 and ended on August 27, 2018 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

## Release

The film had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 21, 2019. On September 27, 2019, the film was available to stream on Netflix.

## Reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 59% of 51 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.7/10. The website's consensus reads: "In the Shadow of the Moon isn't always successful at balancing its assorted elements, but its struggles may be diverting enough to warrant a stream." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 48 out of 100, based on 9 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.
In a 3 out of 5 stars review, The Guardian called the film "odd and unwieldy," but the reviewer added, "I also found myself oddly charmed by its brazen nuttiness, a film aiming for the stars." The Crooked Marquee website opines that director Mickle "does what he can with the screenplay by first-timers Gregory Weidman and Geoffrey Tock, but he's hamstrung by its focus on the cop stuff, which is formulaic, over the sci-fi stuff... The meat of the story, though, which has Locke going a little insane trying to figure out what's happening (and convince others of it), is exciting, nerdy sci-fi business, and Holbrook and Hall wear their weary cop characters well." Similarly, the /Film site reviewer calls it "a frenetic mash-up of sci-fi, mystery, horror, and action," saying that Weidman and Tock "have a wealth of inventive ideas, some of which pack a punch... But the writers never seem fully confident in the story they're telling, and as determined as the film's script is to defy expectations, one can't just help that the writers had settled in on a specific genre and stuck with it." The reviewer for IGN argues that "while the film's ambitions are lofty, it isn't quite the sum of its parts," yet "It's a breathless opener, which startles and thrills in equal measure, the script by Gregory Weidman and Geoffrey Took motoring at breakneck speed, and director Jim Mickle...injecting energy, vitality and intensity into every scene."