SON (2021)

Studio:      Shudder/RLJE Films
Director:    Ivan Kavanagh
Writer:      Ivan Kavanagh
Producer:  AnneMarie Naughton, Louis Tisne, Rene Bastian
Stars:     Andi Matichak, Emile Hirsch, Luke David Blumm, Cranston Johnson, Blaine Maye, J. Robert Spencer, Rocco Sisto, Kristine Nielsen

Review Score:

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Summary:

Years after escaping a cult, a young mother suspects her dark past may be catching up when her son’s bizarre medical condition seemingly connects to a conspiracy.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Pregnant teenager Anna Hansen goes on the run to escape the cult that raised her. While hiding in a car from people pursuing her, Anna gives birth to a boy she names David.

Year later, Anna uses the name Laura to continue raising David in an unassuming suburban lifestyle. One night, noises draw Laura to David’s room where she finds cultists standing around his bed. In a frightened panic, Laura runs across the street to tell her neighbor Susan to call the police. Laura finds David alone in his room when she returns home.

Sympathetic detective Paul and his skeptical partner Steve investigate, but find no evidence that anyone was inside Laura’s house. Paul and Laura take a personal interest in one another.

Laura calls Paul to her house when she hears noises outside, but again Paul finds nothing. Covered in an unusual rash, David enters and collapses on the floor after vomiting blood.

Laura and Paul rush David to the hospital. Unable to determine the cause of David’s mysterious illness, Dr. Bauhn braces Laura to prepare for David’s death. However, David suddenly recovers.

After having dinner together, Paul joins Laura at her house. Paul and Laura kiss until David suddenly falls ill again.

Having rushed David back to the hospital, Laura reveals to Paul that she was raised in a cult and she believes they are responsible for whatever is happening. Laura later hears a doctor whispering conspiratorially about David. When she sees suspicious people arrive at the hospital, Laura takes David to go on the run.

Laura leaves David with her neighbor Susan while she packs a bag for travel. Upon returning to Susan’s house, Laura finds her son bloodily devouring Susan’s dead body. Eating Susan’s flesh heals David. Laura writes “he is coming” above a cult symbol on Susan’s wall before returning to the road with David.

Paul and Steve investigate the crime scene at Susan’s house. Research reveals Laura was institutionalized because her father and other men in a pedophile ring repeatedly raped her as a child. Steve worries Paul’s perspective is compromised because of his relationship with Laura. Paul contends he believes Laura’s claim that a cult is really responsible for the crimes.

Paul tracks down Laura’s former psychiatrist Dr. Bradlee. Dr. Bradlee tells Paul that Laura’s claims of a cult are merely fantasies and that she was driven to delusion by sexual abuse.

Laura tracks down Jimmy Naegle, a fellow abuse survivor who also escaped the cult. Jimmy tells Laura that it wasn’t her father who raped her. Jimmy recounts how Laura used to perform the chanting during the cult’s rituals, and claims she summoned a demon nicknamed ‘The Huntsman’ who impregnated her.

David begs to be fed flesh when he falls ill once again. Laura lures an abusive pimp into their motel room where David mauls him to death. Afterward, Laura dumps the pimp’s mutilated body outside of a church where she writes “he is coming” on a wall.

Paul and Steve try to question Jimmy, but discover his dead body with crosses stuffed in his mouth and the words “he is coming” carved into his chest. When they find the pimp’s body too, Steve points out to Paul that Laura is committing these crimes, not a satanic cult or pedophile ring.

David falls ill again. Steve and two other officers burst into Laura’s motel room. Thinking they are cultists, Laura swiftly shoots all three cops dead.

Laura calls Paul, who advises Laura to turn herself in because she is only imagining the conspiracy against her. Laura tells Paul she is going back to where everything began.

Laura returns to the childhood home she escaped from. Over David’s body, Laura recites an incantation to summon the demon. Laura demands that The Huntsman cure their son. Laura starts seeing demonic figures until Paul suddenly interrupts.

Laura warns Paul that David isn’t human and he will kill again. Laura says she now knows the cult fed David human flesh when they invaded his bedroom, and that act awakened his true nature. Paul begs Laura to seek psychiatric treatment. Since Paul interrupted the ritual for healing her son, Laura raises a knife to kill David instead. Paul shoots Laura through her eye.

Paul sits with David in the hospital. While a nurse is distracted, Paul cuts a chunk of flesh from his arm and feeds it to the boy. Paul tells David that no one can ever learn the truth about him. Paul also tells David that his father has come to see him. The demon enters the room and embraces David.

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Review:

Years ago, pregnant teenager Anna Hansen seemingly escaped a nightmarish cult. Now she leads an ordinary suburban existence under her new name Laura. Despite knowing her character was impregnated at a young age, it’s a tricky adjustment to accept an actress born in 1994 as the mother of an actor born in 2009, particularly since horror fans best know Andi Matichak as Jamie Lee Curtis’s granddaughter in “Halloween” 2018 (review here). “Son” still stuffs its first act with enough of the usual giggling, tickling, and cute connections of convention for Laura to build a tight bond with her son David, even if Matichak could easily be his sister.

Laura and David’s unassuming lives are upended when noises draw Laura to her son’s room in the middle of the night. Laura finds cultists standing around David’s bed. The shocked mother immediately does what any panicking parent would in such a situation. She flees across the street to tell a neighbor to call the police, affording the intruders ample time to predictably, I mean mysteriously, vanish without a trace. What? You didn’t think Laura would try to protect her son from the strangers or call the cops herself, did you?

Emile Hirsch finds out what effect a strangling scandal can have on a career as he skids further from high profile projects to appear in this direct-to-streaming B-movie as police detective Paul. An average cinema cop might treat Laura’s claims of invisible cultists like a real cop would. He’d begrudgingly write a report, reiterate that his search didn’t find anything, and he’d sigh, “There’s nothing we can do” while disinterestedly dismissing Laura without a second thought. Not Paul. He’s cut from a different cloth of clichés. Paul is the kind of hands-on detective who takes an unusually vested interest in this “so what?” case after 60 seconds, handing Laura his personal number and insisting she stay in touch.

Laura keeps Paul so close that a pseudo-dinner date later leads to kissing. Right on cue, David interrupts to reveal a horrible rash before vomiting blood and collapsing on the floor. Coitus gets cancelled as Laura and Paul rush the boy to the hospital.

Not only are doctors baffled by David’s unusual condition, they advise Laura to prepare for the worst. Miraculously, David heals almost as suddenly as he fell sick. The only clues could be the conspiratorial whispers Laura hears in the hallway, and the suspicious people seen lurking outside the hospital.

Convinced the cult has come for her son, Laura takes David on the run. In the meantime, Paul learns Laura has a history of delusions due to being repeatedly raped by her father. If David’s incestuous ancestry isn’t enough of a trauma trigger, you can be additionally turned off by the revelation that, according to her former psychiatrist, Laura’s supposedly satanic cult was actually a ring of pedophiles who traded her and other children like baseball cards.

With Paul trying to track the truth about Laura’s origin, and Laura desperate to solve the riddle of David’s sudden spells of sickness followed by unusual recoveries, “Son” splits into parallel plotlines of drip-fed exposition. Laura seeks help from a fellow abuse survivor, but first she has to speak to that man’s mother. Paul looks for information from Laura’s previous doctor, but first Paul has to track him down through the institution where he used to work. Laura and Paul each end up driving from location to location, sitting through conversation after conversation, on “Son’s” strung-along story of “is she imagining things or is a cult really involved?” Hint: When has the protagonist in this setup ever turned out to actually be crazy?

I initially scored “Son” with an indifferent 50/100 to reflect that it’s a spectacularly average hellspawn thriller with a “how far will one mother go?” motivation on top. The film has two recognizable actors, and that’s about all there is worth noticing. “Son” doesn’t look cheap, although it has comical bald spots like the big bad demon being a lanky actor with alabaster skin wearing small horns glued to his head. I eventually elected to knock the score down into the red zone because “Son” only fills to the minimum line with the lukewarm water of thin characters who exist purely to nudge paltry plot points along a slow and familiar path. It’s an unremarkable horror movie that no reasonable person would ever award a higher accolade than, “It was kind of OK, I guess.”

Review Score: 45

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