LOCKBOX (2026)

Studio:   MGM+/Aura Entertainment
Director: Daniel Stamm
Writer:   Justin Yoffe
Producer: Kearie Peak
Stars:    Carla Gugino, Lou Taylor Pucci, Katherine Isabelle, Jed Rees, Donald Sales

Review Score:

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Summary:

A troubled veteran, his caring cousin, and an eccentric woman become connected to a strange supernatural mystery involving demonic possession.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Looking to reinvent herself after the death of her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, Ellen Hershbergen becomes a volunteer at Father John Dorr’s local church. At the request of a relative, Ellen also agrees to temporarily take in her troubled cousin Winthrop Benson, an Army veteran whose antisocial behavior and chronic bouts of nighttime wandering are attributed to PTSD as well as childhood trauma inflicted by an abusive uncle.

Ellen meets an eccentric neighbor, Vahna Minter, whose friendly yet pushy personality leads to Vahna repeatedly inviting herself into Ellen’s home for dinner, wine, and conversation. Seemingly taking a peculiar interest in Winthrop, Vahna mentions being the jilted lover of Grace Beck, a teacher at a nearby college whom Vahna wants to track down out of vindictiveness. Among other odd actions, Vahna pulls off a fingernail, makes cryptic comments regarding Winthrop, and insists on sleeping in Ellen’s bed after claiming she is too drunk to go home.

Ellen brings Winthrop to church with her. Upon recognizing Winthrop as the startling intruder who wandered onto her porch during the night, parishioner Denise Minotka becomes unsettled. Winthrop tells Ellen he doesn’t remember the incident.

During another instance of nighttime wandering, Winthrop visits Vahna at her home. Behaving bizarrely, Vahna tells Winthrop she knows his uncle kept him in a cage. This triggers a memory in which Winthrop recalls seeing his father decapitated and his mother killed while he was in the backseat during a childhood car accident. Frightened by Vahna, Winthrop tries to leave. A flashback later shows that Vahna, who had secretly been possessed by a demon this entire time, then engaged Winthrop in a violent fight during which the entity transferred to him. Now possessed, Winthrop brutally beat Vahna to death.

After not seeing Vahna in over a week, Ellen goes to her house to retrieve a heater Vahna previously helped herself to. Finding Vahna murdered, Ellen calls the police.

Detective Tom Rousch interviews both Ellen and Winthrop regarding Vahna’s death. When Winthrop is questioned at the police station, Ellen sees Denise Minotka leaving after presumably making a statement about her previous encounter with Winthrop. Winthrop ends up arrested on suspicion of murder. Ellen hires attorney Nina Karlo to represent her cousin.

While in custody, Winthrop has a disturbing vision of brutally killing his guard. When Ellen visits him, Winthrop tells her he feels like someone else’s thoughts are inside his head.

Unable to find any mention of Vahna Minter online, Ellen searches Vahna’s home. Ellen finds revenge-fueled writings she brings to Nina Karlo. Nina tells Ellen her private investigator uncovered that Vahna had a history of assuming various identities and moving to different cities where she held men captive as sex slaves.

Ellen makes an appeal to Breslow, the attorney prosecuting Winthrop, to be lenient with her cousin due to his struggles with abuse and related incidents that occurred during his military service. Meanwhile, Ellen finds the nail Vahna previously pulled off her finger in Winthrop’s empty bed. At Breslow’s recommendation, the judge on the case agrees to delay proceedings for two weeks. Detective Rousch reluctantly releases Winthrop back into Ellen’s custody.

Ellen notices Winthrop acting strangely, including repeating something Vahna once said. The next morning, Ellen wakes to a note revealing Winthrop left unexpectedly.

Acting on a tip from Nina, Ellen tracks down Winthrop at a homeless shelter. Using a notepad to communicate because he believes it is unsafe to speak, Winthrop demands to know where Grace Beck is. Although she is confused by Winthrop’s vehement insistence, Ellen agrees to try finding this woman since Winthrop supposedly needs her to help him.

Ellen later learns Winthrop left the shelter. Ellen finds Winthrop living in an encampment beneath a bridge, wearing women’s clothing and behaving even more like Vahna. Winthrop again demands for his cousin to bring Grace Beck to him.

With help from Nina’s P.I., Ellen acquires an email and phone number for Grace, who is now in hiding under the name Sophie Ellis. Although she is deeply unsettled at being contacted, Grace explains to Ellen over the phone that Vahna was a student in her poetry class. The two of them had an intense relationship that turned obsessive and masochistic. When Vahna told Grace she would never be free of her, Vahna revealed the cryptic story of “the port-a-john man,” an unusual vagrant who promised Vahna a way to live forever. Vahna swore that if Grace ever left her, she would do whatever it took to find Grace. Grace warns Ellen that Vahna is not dead before hanging up.

Apparently possessing paranormal powers, Winthrop leaps around Ellen’s house and then onto Ellen, again demanding to know where Grace is. A small group of people suddenly pulls up in a van. The group tases Winthrop, captures him, and drives away with him in the back of their vehicle.

Ellen follows the van to a remote house. There, a priest named James Light introduces Ellen to fellow priest Father Caldwell, Doctor Emily Warren, and a man named Kevin. Caldwell reveals their group hunts demons, one of which possessed Vahna before transferring into Winthrop. Caldwell adds that the evil targets vulnerable people who are weakened by abuse, neglect, or drugs. He also mentions Vahna’s obsession with Grace, and confirms Grace got away at the same time they lost track of Vahna.

James explains that in rare cases, a gifted person’s brain can form an inescapable neural cage, which ancient texts refer to as a “lockbox,” capable of imprisoning evil entities. Doctor Warren wheels in a catatonic boy whose name is unknown. Although Ellen is shocked that the boy appears held against his will, the priests assure her that he has the ability to absorb pain, and his history makes him unique for the purpose of capturing demonic spirits.

The demonic voices inside the boy privately threaten Ellen that if the other entity is exorcised, her cousin will die. James admits there is a chance something can go wrong, as they have lost two of eight previous possession victims.

The group initiates the transfer of the demon from Winthrop into the boy. When the cameras monitoring the transition go out, Ellen rushes into the room to check on Winthrop. Ellen seemingly sees the boy and her cousin morph into a singular humanoid monster that knocks her out. While unconscious, Ellen experiences haunting visions of her dead mother. Upon returning to reality, Ellen realizes the entity transferred into her. Despite the flesh on her arm tearing painfully, Ellen manages to project the entity into the boy’s cerebral lockbox.

Everyone recovers safely in the aftermath. Winthrop moves out of Ellen’s house to thrive on his own in a new job.

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Review:

Oftentimes, knowing nothing beforehand can be a terrific way to watch a movie, because your imagination is free to engage in immersive fiction without being influenced by expectations. With “Lockbox,” going in blind makes for an amusingly unusual experience, because it’s oddly challenging to get an accurate read on who everyone is or where the story and tone plan to go.

In the film’s first scene, a windowless white van swerves wildly down a quiet country road. A silhouette behind a cage in the back pleads with an unseen driver to let him go. They’re on their way to a remote house. Behind the home’s boarded-up windows, a catatonic boy sits in a wheelchair while cartoons play on a nearby TV. Cut back to the captive man in the van screaming that he doesn’t want to see “the boy!” As the man frantically bashes his bloody head against the cage, the boy suddenly opens his eyes, and an audio sting accompanies the title fading onto the screen.

Set those two minutes aside. For now, and for a long while, that scene doesn’t have anything to do with anything. You’re liable to completely forget about it anyway, as this moment doesn’t come back into play for another hour and change. There’s no way to even guess how it might relate to the main plot, which becomes a common trait shared by many askew elements introduced throughout the movie.

“Lockbox” focuses on three distinctly different characters. They don’t necessarily seem like they come from three completely different movies, though their quirks make it so their individual personas don’t quite fit together seamlessly.

Narration, a conceit used so sporadically one wonders why the script couldn’t find another way to deliver the same information, accompanies the introduction to Ellen. She had been a fashion designer, a children’s book author, and a caretaker to her Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother who died several months ago. Looking to reinvent herself, Ellen settles into her new tucked-away home and volunteers at the local parish, which she hopes to help by hosting fundraisers and making minor repairs. Under other circumstances, viewers might expect to see Ellen bringing homemade cookies to a bedridden neighbor or flowers to a hospital, except she’s played by Carla Gugino, whose always-engaging presence automatically stops Ellen from fully feeling like a stereotypical churchgoing suburbanite.

Ellen clearly cares about others, as evidenced by how eagerly she welcomes her troubled cousin Winthrop into her home. Winthrop doesn’t talk much and doesn’t like to be touched. Part of that has to do with PTSD suffered during his time in the Army. Another part has to do with witnessing his parents’ gruesome deaths and subsequent trauma inflicted by an abusive uncle. Lou Taylor Pucci gives Winthrop a predictable portrayal. He stares with a perpetually perturbed expression. He backs away from hugs like he’s about to be burned. His button-down shirts tuck into pants pulled up past his belly button, straight arms stiff at his side in Pucci’s best Forrest Gump pose. It’s a silly sight, even though Winthrop isn’t meant to be laughed at.

Last but not least is Ellen’s eccentric new neighbor Vahna. While Ellen dresses fashionably for yardwork and Winthrop looks like David Cross about to sing “chicken pot pie,” Vahna comes in riding the wicked witch’s basket bike and sporting a 40-pound wig a drag queen wouldn’t wear for fear of appearing too ostentatious. She has a pushy personality, and Ellen is too kind to ever say no, making for a combo that has Vahna regularly inviting herself into Ellen’s home for dinner, even into Ellen’s bed after claiming she drank too much wine. She’s a weird one for sure. Gugino plays it straight as Ellen. Pucci sweats with “Hurt Locker” intensity. Now here comes Katharine Isabelle having a laugh as Vahna, not going full-on Easter ham, yet you can constantly see how badly Isabelle wants to teeter over the top. Together, these three make for a motley little mix.

So as not to give too much away, let’s just say some disturbing things happen and Winthrop ends up arrested. What happens next is the movie’s midsection becomes a series of procedural scenes swiped from a “Law & Order” writers room. A detective conducts interviews with Ellen, Winthrop, and a neighbor. Ellen hires an attorney for Winthrop. The attorney hires a private investigator. Ellen and the attorney meet with the case’s prosecutor. Everyone appears in a courtroom before a judge.

More peculiar is how many minutes “Lockbox” uses to illustrate the bureaucracy behind getting Winthrop back into Ellen’s custody so more possibly paranormal shenanigans can occur. The same beats could be covered in one single swoop of the detective questioning everyone involved, yet his interrogations take place over three days in three different locations. Counting the courtroom scene, Ellen sits down to discuss circumstances with various lawyers four separate times. Meanwhile, she and the P.I. we never see conduct investigations to dig up more info on the events that put Winthrop behind bars.

There’s such a strange sense of structure that it seems like the story is building to something so much more when in reality, “Lockbox” eventually reveals itself to be a somewhat simple possession/exorcism story. Despite a favorable overall rating, I can’t really say it’s a recommended movie. Yet while watching “Lockbox,” I was conscious of how intolerable it would be with average actors playing routine roles, or how much more run of the mill it would feel if the script were streamlined to be straightforward. From a fascination for filmmaking perspective, there’s something bizarrely alluring about the non-events “Lockbox” chooses to show, and the lowkey chaotic ways in which they’re arranged.

Based on The Knifepoint Horror Podcast “The Lock Box” by Soren Narnia, “Lockbox” is directed by Daniel Stamm, who helmed the pretty good thrillers “The Last Exorcism” in 2010 (review here) and “13 Sins” in 2014 (review here) before spending eight years in television, then returning to features that fell off a cliff in quality with 2022’s “Prey for the Devil” (review here). Perhaps due to Stamm’s time spent on smaller screens, although more likely due to the low budget, a made-for-cable patina quietly colors the presentation. Yet the film never shrinks down to that size thanks to how much bigger everyone agrees to treat the material.

By rights, “Lockbox” should have been entirely ordinary. In some ways, it still is. Then again, it’s hard to maintain “ordinary” as an adjective when one villainous attack involves a man wearing woman’s clothing, violently leaping around in fishnets and spaghetti straps. It’s another kooky bit that “Lockbox’s” cast commits to so fearlessly, it’d be criminal not to applaud them for their entertaining effort that gives familiarity a pleasantly fresh scent.

Review Score: 60

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