Shut In (2016) Review!!!

Synopsis – A heart-pounding thriller about a widowed child psychologist who lives in an isolated existence in rural New England. Caught in a deadly winter storm, she must find a way to rescue a young boy before he disappears forever.

My Take – In a time when small studios are irking to bring out more quality films, EuropaCorp seems to have decided that will continue releasing bad films with known faces. Like most of their releases, here they have an incredibly talented actor/actress (Oscar nominee Naomi Watts in this case) leading the film, along with two young freshly known faces such Charlie Heaton from Netflix’s excellent series Stranger Things & Jacob Tremblay (Room), one of the most powerful child actors in Hollywood today in supporting roles. But the moment you realize this is the same production house which recently released films like Taken 3, Transporter Refueled & Nine Lives, all hopes of a good horror/ thriller are tarnished. This film is not much different, maybe just slightly better mainly due to its dumb but an engaging screenplay. This Farren Blackburn (Hammer of Gods) directed film tries hard to be an intelligent film by dropping all corny scares in favor of a more realistic source of fear – the human psyche forced to figure out what is real and what is an illusion. However, its hackneyed storyline, unnecessary jump scares and an unoriginal twist, inspired by a film released earlier this here, turns this one into one of the most generically dumbest thrillers since Universal‘s 2015 thriller The Boy Next Door. The movie goes through the blueprint of thriller 101 that dates all the way back to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. With Psycho you had a film that was new and original at the time that pushed the boundary for filmmaking. In 2016 a film like that would be just trite and lazy which this is. Just think of Psycho with a “paralyzed” Charlie Heaton. The movie lacks any surprises that you see in thrillers and is cinematically televised that it’s “thrilling” elements comes off unintentionally hilarious. Written by Christina Hodson, who as of late has been tapped to write both a Harley Quinn movie and Bumblebee spinoff, its surprising how the film’s script found its way on to Hollywood’s famed Black List, of the industry’s favorite un-produced scripts, aren’t those films supposed to be good? Not just shallow and insipid rip-offs.

The story follows Dr. Mary Portman (Naomi Watts), a clinical psychologist specializing in kids and teens in a rural Maine community. Portman has personal problems with an adolescent of her own. Following a horrific car accident that claimed the life of her husband, her troubled step son who was about to be shipped off to a boarding school, Stephen (Charlie Heaton), has been left paralyzed and catatonic. Only leaving her house to go to her office next door, Mary’s life has become consumed by the feelings of guilt she has towards her son’s condition. The doctor’s life takes an unusual twist, however, when one of her patients, a deaf nine-year-old foster kid named Tom (Jacob Tremblay), turns up at her house in the middle of the night. Before Mary can get Tom’s caregiver to come out to her place and pick him up, Tom disappears. As that cold Maine winter day turns into an even colder night, Mary and those helping to search for Tom fear the worst. Mary starts “seeing” Tom in her bedroom at night and actually starts thinking that he has died and his ghost is haunting her. Mary has a psychiatrist Dr. Wilson (Oliver Platt) who tries to reason with her and offers to prescribe sleep medication, until he learns there’s something about Mary that he didn’t know. The film spends much of its first half assembling elements that do, at least, inspire curiosity about just how they’ll combine to create havoc, which I must say unfolds quite well. While director Blackburn relies a lot on jump scares and surreal dream sequences, there are some genuinely tense moments as Mary questions her sanity. To his credit, the director does a good job of blurring the line between fantasy and reality, and does build an unsettling atmosphere in Mary’s otherwise very nice house. A scene involving a presence in a tiny cupboard is built up in truly sinister fashion, and is one of the highlights of this film. These and other red herrings, however, don’t really solve the movie’s basic problem: For ages, there’s nothing substantial for either Mary or the viewer to actively fear. Even if Tom is a ghost, he’s a decidedly unthreatening one, looking and behaving exactly like the timid little boy he’d been in life. So much of the film is thrown together haphazardly for no damn reason. Why is there a subplot where one of Mary’s patient’s dads is hitting on her? Why does Oliver Platt even need to be here? Why is Jacob Tremblay’s character deaf?. In a perfect world, I’d give this movie the benefit of the doubt and say “Oh, well, there doesn’t need to be a reason for him to be deaf. It’s representation for the differently abled!” Except the film seems to be under the impression that Tom being deaf plays up the whole “creepy kid” angle like for no reason whatsoever. After nearly an hour of Mary wandering nervously around and outside her dark house, clad in great-looking sweaters and being scared by raccoons instead of the usual cats, the film springs the twist that presumably landed Christina Hodson’s screenplay on Hollywood’s influential Black List, kicking the movie into gear at long last.

Anyone familiar with thrillers will have guessed the shocking surprise long beforehand, though some will mistakenly dismiss the possibility as too ludicrous to countenance. This film is an odd fusion of two very different genres: a character-driven, psychological study of the effects grief has on a person, and a jump-scare-laden survival horror flick. Imagine if someone had decided to remake The Theory of Everything, but as a horror movie, and throw in some elements of Sleepaway Camp as well, and you have this movie. This combo does occasionally result in some very nice moments, but ultimately, fails to really work. Here, the twist, which was done significantly better (if not good) in William Brent Bell’s film The Boy starring Lauren Cohan, was supposed to save the movie from the hour of low-energy tedium that came before , just ends up being bad on so many levels. There are some differences, obviously. Instead of the bad guy hiding in the wall we get the bad guy hiding someone else in the wall. Basically, Stephen’s a big ol’ faker with an Oedipus complex and a penchant for slipping dear mother his meds. When this other kid comes along and starts “stealing” Mary’s affections, he snaps and traps the kid in the crawlspace. It’s obvious, first off. It adds a level of implied sexual menace that none of us need to watch or think about, well exceptions for fan of Naughty America can be made. Stephen wanting to schtup Mary, who raised him since he was five and is basically the only mom he’s ever known, is never explicitly spelled-out by the filmmakers, but really though. He strips her naked, puts her in the bath and ties her to the faucet. He uses his body to pin her against furniture while talking about how they should always be together, just the two of them. No thanks! The underrated Naomi Watts gives her all to this overheated nonsense, but is powerless to make emotional sense of what turns out to be the story’s twisted central relationship, and ends up being just another fiercely maternal damsel in distress. The movie’s younger cast members do not fare so well; Charlie Heaton is a little over the top as Steven, while Jacob Tremblay, so great in the Oscar-nominated Room, is largely wasted here, having nothing to do but play a generic kid in trouble. This is his second horror/thriller film in a row (Before I Wake), really someone get this kid a new agent! There are some side characters scattered about, including David Cubitt as a potential love interest for Mary, Clémentine Poidatz’s concerned secretary, and Oliver Platt, playing Mary’s shrink and looking in the final act like he’s trying to stifle laughter at the lines he’s been tasked with delivering. None of them matter. They’re only on hand to make it seem like less of a three hander between Watts and her younger co-stars. Those three are the only reason to see the film since they’re the only characters that matter, and yet, none of them can make it worth watching. On the whole, ‘Shut In’ is a lazily generic thriller that uses stale tricks to scare & ends up being a bland rip off in the grand scheme of things.