Shed had its world première at Screamfest, 12th Oct 2025
“Mum, dad, where have you gone? I’m locked in the shed. I’m locked in the shed, mum.”
The speaker is 10-year-old Mia (the extraordinary Mani Shanks), some days after she sneaked into her home’s detached garage during a game of Christmas hide and seek with her family, only for her brother Jayden (Travis Barrett) to bolt the door behind her. She has no water, and only a pack of frozen mince for food, and cannot understand why no one has come looking for her. Mia’s only company is a centipede – and a spider which at first terrifies her until her own ever more Darwinian predicament leads her to empathise with its survivalist spirit. Soon, though, she will make her own friend – a piece of wood with a jar lid attached on which she has drawn a face. This is not unlike the volleyball ‘Wilson’ from Robert Zemeckis’ Cast Away (2000), except that Mia dubs her emotional crutch ‘Lucy’, perhaps for Lucy van Pelt who offers psychiatric help in Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts comics. There is, after all, a copy of Don’t Give Up, Charlie Brown (1988) glimpsed in the shed with her.
This is not a casual reference. For like Schulz’s Peanuts, writer/director Steven J. Mihaljevich’s Shed confines us largely to a small child’s perspective, so that adult characters, when they appear at all, tend to have their faces out of focus if not entirely out of shot. What we have known from very early on – but Mia, with her restricted point of view shut away in the shed, will take some time to work out – is that she has not merely been overlooked or forgotten by her family. Rather, a terminally ill, psychologically disturbed Stranger (Jason Robert Lester) – whose ample size and thick beard lend him a seasonal resemblance to Santa Claus – has forced his way into the family home and shot mum (Jem Lee), dad (Matthew Perkin) and little Jayden, finishing them off with an axe.
This scenario in which a young child left alone to face with violent home invasion over the Yuletide period may sound like Christopher Columbus’ Home Alone (1990), but Shed is a lot more realistic in its portrayal of both Mia’s resilience and resourcefulness, and the limits of what she can do whether trapped alone in a space without basic provisions, or threatened by a dangerous man. Far from being played for cartoonish laughs, Mia’s traumatic experiences are deeply distressing, and the Stranger’s arrival has harrowing, irreversible consequences. In fact a closer analogue than Home Alone would be Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek (2005), in which a serial killer horrifically brutalises all whom he encounters – and its star John Jarratt has a brief yet significant cameo here where he might just be reprising his rôle from McLean’s film as murderous bushman Mick Taylor. This too is set in the West Australian outback, where Mia will learn of her own nature and place in the food chain – and as we see the odds stacking against her, the film’s tension becomes unbearable.
When the title of Shed first appears on screen, the first three letters are in red while the last is in white, emphasising the femininity of the protagonist in a film where the predators are all male – whereas the only thing predatory about Mia herself is the childish dinosaur motif on the pyjamas that she wears throughout the film. Mia’s tender age, diminutive size and female sex make her seem utterly vulnerable and no match for the hulking monster of a man ranged against her – which is why her ordeal, both inside and outside the shed, puts us through the wringer too, as we wonder how on earth this little girl is meant to navigate, perhaps even survive, such hostile adult circumstances, ultimately as incomprehensible to us as to her.
strap: Steven J. Mihaljevich’s Christmas home invasion thriller confines a young girl to a garage with a desperate, disturbed and dangerous man outside
© Anton Bitel
