The Shepherd is a fairly random 35 minute short film on Disney+ produced by Alfonso Cuarón and co-starring a surprise John Travolta. It’s technically a Christmas film but has more the mood of a gentle Twilight Zone or Amazing Stories episode.

It’s about a pilot in 1957 who has lost instrumentation in a thick soup of fog and is flying blind over the North Sea. With no way of finding home, he desperately radios into the night.

This short starts pretty slow and doesn’t represent itself well with its rather bad visual effects. It doesn’t rely on those visuals to tell its story so I can give it a little pass for looking so meh.

Thankfully once the pilot makes contact with another plane, things start to improve. The film generates a wistful, introspective, almost eerie mood as its story unfolds. I won’t go into what happens, but he gets an assist from someone else in the clouds… and given that it’s advertised as a Christmas movie, thankfully it’s not Santa Clause.

By the end, I was engrossed by the quiet, foggy aesthetic and the cold, lonely night. It’s final text crawl is endearing and made me a little somber and thoughtful. This is a pretty special little flick, even as it leans more toward Halloween than Christmas.

Score: 84