This is not to say the film is ineffective it is designed to make sense if you look back and contemplate on the audacity of the revelation, too. The actors, all of them, look a bit too urgent, like they know the twisted tone of the story they’re occupying. Oliver Platt, in particular, plays an annoyingly consequential colleague of Mary’s, who spouts psychobabble and appears destined to fall prey to the frivolousness of collateral damage. This predictability of the film’s inherent unpredictability is hard to shake off. She isn’t exactly mother-of-the-year material, but then what traumatized cinematic soul ever is?
This is not to say the film is ineffective it is designed to make sense if you look back and contemplate on the audacity of the revelation, too. Mary’s predicament is contrived to be disorienting enough – what with the repeated use of vivid flashbacks meshing with wishful memories. This happens, too, but I’ve already prepared myself for this jarring inevitability by now – blocking my ears, instead of my eyes. Which is when, again, conditioned to years of similar motifs, you immediately expect these nervous chuckles to be destroyed by the real thing. Yet she walks ever so slowly, on and on, until the poor creature finally appears. To be fair, predictable as its atmospheric ingredients are, the film doesn’t make it easy to anticipate the nature of the twist.Įarly on, when Mary investigates the source of strange noises outside the house, you can smell the classic fake-out coming – a raccoon in this case. For its initial period, the film borders on the realms of the ghostly, tiptoeing between two oft-abused horror genres, until it yanks you back into the factual world, back into the confines of spasmodic heads. Or perhaps because we’ve been just made to look in the wrong direction. Perhaps because this moment comes earlier than is the norm, disguising itself in a sort of cry-wolf magic realism, which in turn forces the last thirty minutes play out like a standard slasher-flick. The irony of a child psychologist unable to set her own mental house in order isn’t lost on us – a sentimental device later exploited and squeezed for every drop’s worth in a brutally stretched-out and hammy climax. To be fair, predictable as its atmospheric ingredients are, the film doesn’t make it easy to anticipate the nature of the twist. When he mysteriously goes missing, the house begins to behave like a true horror-movie protagonist. She instead invests her emotions into the recovery of a deaf, unruly orphan (Tremblay). Shut In is the kind of self-conscious psychological thriller that lies somewhere between early-Shyamalan and present-day-Shyamalan on the B-movie-twist scale. She has deep affection for the once-pleasant boy, but is always on the verge of sending him away in true American-dysfunctional style. Yet, some things never change: there’s the picturesque creaky house in the middle of foggy-nowhere, an icy lake, a dark past, a noisy storm, creepy children (it was only a matter of time before a filmmaker transformed Room’s adorable Jacob Tremblay into an Omen-ish presence), enough pristine snow to start a gothic-horror franchise, startlingly loud after-dark sound cues, nightmares as narrative red herrings and, most importantly, three tragically unhinged human minds.Ĭlinical psychologist Mary Portman (Naomi Watts) – doesn’t her name sound like the kind you’d come across at the corner of a small-town daily? (“Doctor family slaughtered by own twins!”) – struggles to take care of her paralyzed troubled-stepson stereotype, Steven ( Stanger Things’ Charlie Heaton), after an accident kills her husband. It’s still perversely welcoming to watch a spook-fest not reliant on supernatural tropes, vengeful ghouls, exorcism, needy dead folks and intelligent spirits for a change – a throwback to the “good old days” of real-life terror.
0 kommentar(er)
