Director: Jeff Wadlow
Cast: DeWanda Wise, Tom Payne, Taegen Burns, Pyper Braun
Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Brand new.
Did I Like It: Or is it? What a twist! Tell me, have you, dear reader, seen a horror movie with the following premise? An uneasy family moves into a home with which one or more of them have a—likely traumatic—connection. Supernatural things happen. The family is either trauma bonded, irrevocably torn asunder, or maybe both.
You have seen that movie? Well, then, let me save you a little bit of time: You’ve seen this film as well.
That’s not an irredeemable sin for a movie to commit. If there is truly nothing new under the sun, then a cynical viewer might be able to level that condemnation even at horror films which work. The real problem with matters is that—aside from a few correctly executed startles (you’ve seen those, too)—the film is resolute in its commitment to not illicit any kind of response whatsoever. You know things are bad when the single largest moment of tension during the film was when I was supremely worried that the people sitting to my left were going to confront the people sitting to my right for having their cell phone continue to go off* throughout the film.
The film isn’t scary. It isn’t interesting. It is so far weighed down by exposition that it feels like the writers convinced themselves at some point that they had a nine-movie series on their hands, eventually came to see reason and realized they barely had one movie on their hands, but felt compelled to burn through all of this mythology all the same.
*I, too, had my phone on throughout, as it was my only note-taking solution for the forthcoming Beyond the Cabin in the Woods episode. It was under the table and at a minimum of illumination, but I was prepared to pretend like I didn’t have a dog in the fight if push came to shove.