COBWEB (2023)

Studio:    Lionsgate
Director: Samuel Bodin
Writer:   Chris Thomas Devlin
Producer: Roy Lee, Andrew Childs, Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen, James Weaver, Josh Fagen
Stars:    Lizzy Caplan, Woody Norman, Cleopatra Coleman, Antony Starr, Luke Busey, Jay Rincon

Review Score:

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Summary:

Influenced by an eerie voice from behind his bedroom wall, a troubled young boy begins to suspect his parents may be hiding a horrifying secret.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

One week before Halloween, Peter begins hearing strange sounds and then a young girl's voice from behind his bedroom wall. Peter's mother Carol insists Peter merely has an overactive imagination while his father Mark claims the noises are caused by rats, which Mark has Peter help him prepare poison for.

Because he is regularly bullied by his classmate Brian at Holdenfield Elementary School, Peter stays inside alone during recess. Peter's substitute teacher Miss Devine notices the boy has no friends and takes a sympathetic interest in him.

Based on a conversation with Miss Devine about costumes, Peter asks his parents if he can dress up for Halloween. Carol reminds Peter he is forbidden from trick-or-treating as Mark mentions Rebecca Holbrook, a neighborhood girl who went missing several years ago on October 31st, seemingly inspiring overprotective fear in Carol.

As part of a Halloween art project to paint a scary picture, Miss Devine observes Peter painting an image of himself in a dark bedroom with the words "help me." Concerned, Miss Devine personally delivers the picture to Carol at Peter's house. Carol curtly dismisses Miss Devine by again claiming her son has an overactive imagination. When Carol later confronts Peter about the image, he whispers that the person asking for help isn't him, but rather the girl on the other side of the wall.

Back at school, Brian smashes a pumpkin Peter painted for another art project. When he tells her about the incident afterward, the voice in the wall coaxes Peter into standing up for himself by forcing Brian to fear him. After Brian is humiliatingly forced to apologize to Peter in front of their class, Peter pushes him down a staircase, inadvertently causing Brian to break his leg.

Carol and Mark discipline Peter for getting expelled from school. When he tries to say it was the girl's voice that influenced him to attack Brian, Mark punishes Peter by chaining him up in the basement.

Having learned about her unsanctioned visit to Peter's house, the school's principal warns Miss Devine about getting personally involved with students. Miss Devine mentions there is something off about Peter's mother, to which the principal replies that Carol is probably on edge as a parent due to Rebecca Holbrook's disappearance years ago.

Miss Devine writes her phone number on Peter's final math test before dropping it off at Peter's house. While there, Miss Devine becomes further suspicious of Peter's parents when she notices Mark's arm bleeding severely, Carol getting overly defensive about her mothering, and banging sounds from the basement that Mark passes off as the washing machine.

Carol eventually lets Peter out of the cellar to return to his bedroom. When they speak again, the voice reveals she is Sarah, a sister Peter didn't know he had. Sarah claims she waited to contact Peter because she needed him to become big enough to move the clock blocking the secret door to her hidden room, and it took her this long to claw her way to his wall. Sarah additionally warns that their parents will eventually lock up Peter in the wall with her. To prove that Carol and Mark are evil killers, Sarah directs Peter to a spot outside where he digs up a skull. Sarah claims the skull belongs to Rebecca Holbrook, whom Carol and Mark killed when she came to the house on Halloween and Sarah tried to ask her for help escaping. Peter vows to free Sarah so they can run away together.

Using the phone number written on the math test, Peter calls Miss Devine for help, but Carol interrupts. Becoming worried after finding a hole in his bedroom wall, Carol demands to know what "she" told Peter. After overhearing Carol speaking frantically to Mark, Peter becomes additionally suspicious of his parents when Mark forces him to dig a large hole in the yard, supposedly for burying rotting pumpkins.

On Halloween, Peter secretly spikes his parents' soup with rat poison. Mark and Carol violently vomit before dying painfully. With her last breath, Carol warns Peter not to let "her" out as he removes keys from around Carol's neck.

Peter moves the clock to unlock the secret door hidden behind it. However, Peter immediately hides in fright from the spider-like humanoid that emerges.

Wearing Halloween masks, Brian and three of his older cousins arrive at the house to take revenge on Peter. The four boys smash up the house until Sarah viciously kills each of them one by one.

Sarah explains to Peter that she was an abomination who became feral after their parents forced her to live in secret. She then grew jealous of Peter because he got to live a comparatively normal life she views as "perfect," so she tricked him into releasing her in order to have her revenge on everyone.

Miss Devine comes to the house, kicking off an extended confrontation with Sarah. Despite Sarah trapping him behind the wall and then in another hidden pit, Miss Devine ultimately rescues Peter and the two of them recapture Sarah. Sarah's monstrous voice turns into that of an innocent girl's again as she pleads for Peter to help her. When he refuses, Sarah tells Peter he is now a killer just like she is, and she will continue to haunt him "always."

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Review:

In 2043, or whenever movie websites do their usual anniversary retrospectives on a particular year in cinema (assuming internet media still exists in its current form, of course), the summer of 2023 will be popularly remembered as the time when Barbenheimer blew up the box office. Some horror fans, on the other hand, may instead use the theatrical thrillers that failed during this same period as another specious talking point in the dubious debate over release dates.

It's funny how, without fail, a stacked October full of more fright films than any one person could possibly watch always ignites the perennial question, "Why do distributors only release new horror movies around Halloween? We consume this content year-round!" Except when films like "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" and "Cobweb" drop out of the Top Ten like hot rocks after one or two weekends in July or August, some of those same voices see the low turnout and instead ask, "Well, why didn't they release this movie around Halloween?" Pick a lane, people.

They may have a point about "Cobweb" though. The film takes place over the seven days leading up to and including horror's highest holiday, with kids in costumes, plenty of pumpkins, and a finale featuring troublesome trick-or-treaters all occupying scenery. By any metric, "Cobweb" IS a "Halloween movie." Nevertheless, I still don't see how a different month of the year would have made an appreciable difference in viewers largely treating it as an average chiller.

Rather than blaming misfired marketing or a studio's seemingly poor understanding of the calendar for "Cobweb's" disappointing ticket sales, I'd prefer to posit a different theory. Maybe the movie barely blipped on a general audience's radar because it's only formulaic fright fare. Maybe, just maybe, it simply wasn't worth a burdensome drive to an AMC, paying $1X per person, and putting up with the nuclear glow of every talkative teenager's iPhone to watch the same brand of standard suspense that streaming services burp up on a weekly basis.

I'm not saying "Cobweb" is bad. It isn't. I'm also not saying it's poorly made. It certainly isn't. I'm just saying, "Meh, why would I want to go to a theater for this?"

When you can actually see through the thick shadows that blanket just about every frame, "Cobweb" essentially looks good, as the cinematography crafts copious audiovisual creeps. Especially in its opening sequence, "Cobweb" channels plenty of relatable chills we all experienced in the dark of our childhood bedrooms. Unexplained scratching noises within the walls. Clock hands whose ticks amplify deafening silence in between. Creaking ropes swinging outside. Sharp scrapes against the side of the house. Wind causing a screen door to rattle on rusty hinges. "Cobweb" becomes a show-and-tell for all of the sounds and shapes that inevitably scare imaginative children, kind of like "Skinamarink" (review here) tried to do, except "Cobweb" has an actual story.

Although the spooks can be subtle, the characterizations are anything but. Pulling from the pages of "Joan Crawford's Big Book of B-Movie Acting," Lizzy Caplan puts on a "play to the back row" performance that could substitute for a spiral-cut ham at a holiday dinner. As the overprotective mother to Peter, a sheltered young boy slowly driven to dirty deeds by a mysterious girl's voice behind his wall, Caplan plays Carol with such exaggerated Puritan poise that she drips with suspicion from the word "go." Understated, she is not.

Through less fault of his own, Antony Starr meets Caplan at the same summit so they can go over the top together as Peter's peculiar parents. Already unable to be unseen as the smugly unstable timebomb Homelander on "The Boys," the film does Starr no favors in the "oh, he could be a good guy" department by immediately framing him as highly likely to be hiding something sinister. I'm not sure "Cobweb" ever really intends for anyone to think Carol and Mark might be merely misunderstood, or that the wicked words being whispered to Peter about them could be at least partially untrue. But any possible doubts are quickly smashed to pieces when the camera does something like putting Starr in silhouette so he can ominously warn Peter to "be careful, not everything is as sweet as it seems."

The savior yin to Carol and Mark's "fooling no one" yang is Miss Devine, a teacher occupying the required role of concerned adult that all such stories about troubled children in supernatural situations have. She's actually a substitute at Peter's school, which explains away why she has no prior history with Peter, and why she might suddenly get involved in a personal matter she would have handled differently as a permanent faculty member. Cryptic warning signs hint at a figurative fire smoldering at his home, so Miss Devine takes a couple of carefully spaced-out trips to Peter's dark house, where literally every room appears to be in dire need of brighter lightbulbs, before gradually growing into his sole hope for survival.

When it becomes clear that Peter's parents are protecting a different secret than what we're initially led to think, "Cobweb" hits a logic hurdle that gives its believability a big bruise. As in, it becomes abundantly evident that the boy is on a collision course with a shocking truth Carol and Mark are desperate to keep buried. And yet they do absolutely nothing to prevent him from finding out more, instead pretending that everything eerie is all in his head when they know perfectly well what true danger has finally presented itself. Horror films like "Saw" and "Malignant" (review here) have had implausible twists that unexpectedly made those movies better because of how ridiculously fun they ended up being. "Cobweb's" reveal leans too heavy toward the ridiculous and too far from the fun.

Predictably plotted fiction aside, "Cobweb" hits many of the basic notes for a safe composition of creeps and boos. I'd expect nothing less from director Samuel Bodin, the guy who gave us the unjustly underseen series "Marianne," which comes with a big thumb up for whatever my recommendation is worth. Bodin is certainly seasoned in scariness. There's just nothing novel to "Cobweb" that would raise the hackles of a fan who's equally familiar with filmic frights. "Cobweb" may indeed be a "Halloween movie," but it's a lot of old tricks with very few new treats.

Review Score: 55

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