Rob Savage’s Stephen King adaptation is a tidy, well-acted film that frightens properly whenever the lights are low and loses its nerve when they come up. Sophie Thatcher holds it together; the script gives her little to hold.
Rob Savage has taken a Stephen King short story that fits inside one conversation and stretched it over a house with three grieving people in it. Sadie Harper (Sophie Thatcher) has lost her mother; her little sister Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair) sleeps with a glowing plastic moon; their father Will (Chris Messina) listens to strangers for a living and cannot manage five minutes with his own children. Then Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian) turns up in Will’s front room, uninvited, and says something took his kids. That is the setup, and it is a good one. What follows is a well-built film that is properly frightening for an hour and then stops being frightening, and the reason is simple: it shows us the thing.
While it keeps the thing in the dark, it is a pleasure. Eli Born lights the house so that the darkness begins about a foot from every lamp, and Jeremy Woodward gives him a house full of half-open doors, a closet that will not stay shut and a basement that nobody has a reason to enter and everybody does. The best scene is built out of a child’s toy. Sawyer rolls her light across the bedroom floor and under the bed, and each time it comes back we are shown a little more than the time before. We were, for about ninety seconds, as frightened as we have been in a cinema for a while, and it was done with a nightlight, a bed and a child who has decided to look.
Thatcher is the reason the rest of it holds. She plays Sadie as a girl who has decided that being angry is easier than being sad, and she does it without a single speech about grief, which is more than the script manages. Blair is unusually good for a child actor at being scared rather than acting scared. Messina has the harder job, a father written as a closed door, and he mostly plays the door. Dastmalchian has one scene and makes a whole life out of it, hunched and apologetic and plainly not right. Marin Ireland, as his wife Rita, appears later and plays her as someone who has not slept in a year.
Savage is patient with his scares. Peter Gvozdas holds a shot a beat longer than we expect and then another beat, so that we are looking at the wrong part of the frame when it happens. Patrick Jonsson’s score stays low, mostly a hum with something under it, and for long stretches Savage does without music altogether and lets the house creak. Kari Perkins dresses Sadie in her dead mother’s clothes, which the film uses once, quietly, and then leaves alone.
The script is where it thins. Scott Beck, Bryan Woods and Mark Heyman have made the monster a metaphor for grief and then, in case we missed it, have a therapist (LisaGay Hamilton, as Dr Weller) explain it to Sadie in a consulting room. The school scenes, in which Bethany (Madison Hu) and her friends are cruel to Sadie about her mother, belong to a different and duller film and are cut in as if the editor knew it. Nobody in the house buys a torch, and the film knows we have noticed and has no answer.
The last half hour is the weakest, for reasons we will not go into. It is enough to say that the film becomes a more ordinary horror film than the one it had been for an hour, and that somewhere in it we stopped being frightened. We were watching an effect, and thinking about the nightlight, and wishing the film had trusted itself.
Savage made Host (2020) on a laptop screen in a locked-down flat, and it was cleverer than this. Here he has proved he can do the old kind of horror, the dark room and the held breath, and do it well, inside a studio film that wants a creature at the end. Beck and Woods wrote A Quiet Place (2018), and this has the same shape: a family, a rule about the dark, and a third act that gives up on the rule.
Watch it with the lights off, because that is the only condition under which its best trick works. Ninety-nine minutes, a 15 certificate, and one scene with a plastic moon that we would set against most of what horror has offered in the last few years. The rest is competent, and it knows it.
