‘This is an old house, there’s bound to be bumps in the night…’
Who’d have thought that a film set over Halloween weekend, packed full of Halloween iconography (pumpkins, trick or treaters and spooky costumes all feature prominently) and released in the middle of summer at the same time as Barbie and Oppenheimer would fail to set the box office alight. Ah well. Forget the poor marketing and the underwhelming box office performance. This is an excellent horror debut from first-time director Samuel Bodin…
We begin with a classic horror set-up. Peter, A lonely kid (Woody Norman) who lives in a huge, gothic house, begins to hear strange noises coming from inside the walls. When he shares this frightening experience with his mother Carol (Lizzy Caplan) and father Mark (Antony Starr) they respond with indifference. Meanwhile, Peter’s teacher Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman) attempts to shield him from the difficulties of school life – particularly his run-ins with the school bully (Luke Busey – son and spitting image of Gary Busey).
Bodin, working from a screenplay by Chris Thomas Devlin, knows how to create a sense of dread. While there are echoes of Insidious and The Conjuring, Devlin knows how to build tension by not allowing the viewer to understand the full implications of what they are seeing until the very end of the movie. Devlin plays with perspective using in-camera trickery to ensure that we are always seeing the world from Peter’s point of view. The walls are awfully high and the stairs awfully steep and this aesthetic reminded me a little bit of Skinamarink and how that film so perfectly captured the feeling of jumping at shadows as a small child. He also does a good job of lighting the film in such a way that while much of it takes place in darkness, this doesn’t come at the expense of clarity.
In terms of performance, while Starr’s scenery-chewing turn is too reminiscent of his role as the villainous Homelander in The Boys, Caplan is excellent playing against type as a tightly wound Stepford wife. The two of them, together with a confident turn from Woody Norman, create a realistic family dynamic and this helps to ground the film in the more fantastical sequences.
Cobweb is a creepy and effective horror movie that deserved better marketing and a more appropriate release date. Quietly excellent.