Come Play (2020)

Score: 2.5 / 5

It's hard for me to feel jaded about any theatrical release this year, simply because I've missed going to the cinema so much. Come Play is one of those releases that, when not in a pandemic, I'd have been annoyed with and possibly even disliked. Not that there's really anything wrong with it formally, mind, nor is it ever less than absorbing during its 100-minute runtime. That's the magic of horror films for me, at least for the most part; I'd rather watch a slow, silly, or stupid horror movie than a comedy or romance any day because of pure adrenaline-fueled wonder at what might happen next. Plus, fear is a deliciously underappreciated sensation.

Young Oliver, a nonverbal autistic boy, primarily uses his smartphone to communicate with others, which has made him the victim of bullying by his classmates. His parents, both of whom are actually pretty darn good parents, are on the verge of splitting up. One night, Oliver opens a mysterious new app called "Misunderstood Monsters", which is apparently a digital picture book. Despite nightmarish drawings of a figure the book calls Larry -- the images seem inspired by Stephen Gammell's illustrations for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, if that helps you visualize something a child should absolutely not be seeing -- Oliver reads until he gets too spooked. Larry just wants a friend, the book says, and poor Oliver does too.

As it is, Come Play fits into a subgenre of horror preoccupied with the relationships of children to monstrosity: from James Whale's Frankenstein to The Babadook, the perennial dark fantasy of children being drawn to that which should terrify us. Could it be that they haven't learned to fear that which society hates? Could it be that they are uniquely susceptible to diabolic charms? A lack of answers helps the genre function in a culture that so worships youth and childhood as symbols of life and a future. This movie also belongs, in terms of adaptive form, to a sub-subgenre of flicks in recent years inspired by successful short films. This one, based on writer/director Jacob Chase's short "Larry", in many ways takes its cue from Andres Muschietti's Mama or David F. Sandberg's Lights Out. 

As in those, the best sequences are those in which the short is directly transposed into a centerpiece of the film. Here that means the father, working his lonely shift as a parking lot monitor, is surrounded by dark, open spaces in which shadows looks more scary than the void. However, I found the basic premise of this particular movie difficult to rationalize, as Larry increasingly tries to enter the real world, apparently able to move and manifest as a result of electrical devices and currents. If the movie were so interested in the monstrosity that is (or can be) the abuse of devices with black mirrors, I'm surprised that this flick was so determined to make Larry supernatural and corporeal. And then there's the bullying of Oliver, which makes up a significant part of the early plot but utterly vanishes by the halfway point.

Where this particular movie succeeds is in its masterful control of terror. This is a jumpscare factory, a veritable haunted house of boogeymen, lights flickering, doors and furniture moving on their own. A particularly, nastily effective scene involves Oliver and his bullying "friends" trapped in a sleepover together as they use their tablet to look for Larry in the house. By the time Larry indeed physically manifests in the house -- a la the Crooked Man from The Conjuring 2 -- we're suitably scared and ready for a showdown. And this one does not disappoint in terms of action and continued scares. Unfortunately, its logic begins to unravel in the final sequences, to the point that what should be an emotional climax felt cheap, cruel, and unearned to me.