Cobweb (2023)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Eight-year-old Peter is shy and bullied and at risk. Thankfully, his substitute teacher notices and tries to take him under her wing, but his emotionally distant parents put a firm stop to that. With Halloween approaching, Peter -- who many kids but especially queer and neurodivergent kids would relate to -- wants to celebrate and go trick-or-treating, but his parents won't let him. They say a young girl disappeared on Halloween once, and they don't want Peter to be in similar danger. But staying at home hardly seems pleasant with those two demanding, disconnected parental figures. And Peter has been hearing knocking in the wall of his bedroom, taps accompanied by the voice of a young girl, who claims to have been trapped in the walls by Peter's "evil" parents.

Scared yet? You should be. There's not a lot of terribly original material in Samuel Bodin's directorial debut, Cobweb, but it's a fabulously fun time and a suitably spooky addition to anyone's Halloween horror roster. Think something along the lines of The People Under the Stairs and The Babadook and you'll appreciate the heavily stylized horror of this film along with its layers of psychological complexity. We may not talk about Bruno, but this voice in the walls is the stuff of nightmares. The more she sympathizes with Peter and builds rapport with him, the more he acts out and upsets his parents. Then Peter's bullies are brutally attacked by, well, whoever belongs to the voice. Is she his guardian angel, or a monstrous fiend looking to break in to the house?

It doesn't always matter, in this film, as our focus is tightly drawn on Peter (Woody Norman) and his psyche as he weighs the value of the various people in his life. The aptly named Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman) tries to help him, but she's repeatedly hindered by his parents Mark and Carol (Antony Starr and Lizzy Caplan) doing their brilliantly understated creepy thing at every turn. Their dynamic makes up the bulk of the film, interspersed with nasty sequences of people getting their comeuppance for interfering in this insular family's affairs. There aren't a ton of jump scares, but the few that exist are inspired and chilling, earned by their raw, low-budget creativity. It helps that Bodin's atmosphere, helped by grim production design and showstopping cinematography by Philip Lozano, is not unlike that within a haunted house. A real one, not a carnival attraction. For the most part.

Its plot is simple even if there always seems to be something happening. The film is an exercise in misdirection; one might think that Hitchcock would have made something like this had he survived this long and gotten a taste for the "maybe supernatural, maybe psychological" horror so popular in recent years. As its title suggests, it's as though the writer (who also wrote the unspeakable 2022 requel Texas Chainsaw Massacre) tossed several ideas onto a web before deciding all the dangly bits made for good ambiance. There's an intentionally off-putting stilt to most of the dialogue, especially from the parents, which makes the proceedings unnerving because it's all so unnatural, and this is a rare occasion when that effect enhances the film rather than detracts from it. By about the halfway point, it becomes clear what's really going on in Peter's house, but by then we're more than ready for the scary showdown we've been promised. And while it won't be to everyone's liking, if you let yourself get on Cobweb's odd wavelength, it'll creep its way under your skin, too.