Zach Cregger’s follow-up to Barbarian is a horror-mystery about a class of children who vanish in the night, told chapter by chapter and made with skill. The first hour frightened us; the last half hour is louder and sillier, and we liked it less.
A child’s voice (Scarlett Sher) sets it out at the start, the way you might tell a story at a sleepover. One night at 2:17, every child in one class got out of bed, went downstairs, opened the front door and ran into the dark, and none of them came back. Zach Cregger, whose last film was Barbarian, then spends 129 minutes on the town they left behind. It is a good horror film, frightening for an hour and clever for longer than that, and in its last act it becomes a louder, sillier film that we enjoyed less.
The best thing in it comes early. Larkin Seiple shoots the streets at night under orange lamps with a great deal of black between them, and the children run down the middle of the road with their arms held straight out behind them, as children do when they pretend to fly. Some of it we see on doorbell cameras, small and grey and silent. We felt cold watching it, a cold that started in the shoulders, and nothing in the film’s later, busier stretches came near it.
The film is built in chapters, each named for one person and each starting a little before the last one ended. Julia Garner plays Justine, the class’s teacher, who has done nothing wrong and is treated by the town as though she had; Garner keeps her tight and jumpy, drinking in the car, with a temper showing under the fear. Josh Brolin is Archer, whose son is among the missing, and he plays grief as a man who has decided to be angry instead. Alden Ehrenreich is a local policeman with troubles of his own, Austin Abrams a thief who keeps ending up in the wrong houses, Benedict Wong the headteacher with an empty classroom to explain. Joe Murphy cuts so that a scene we watched from the pavement turns up again from inside the window, and that is a real pleasure. It also has a cost. By the fourth chapter we knew the rhythm and were waiting for it.
Somewhere in the middle Amy Madigan arrives as Gladys, an aunt of Alex (Cary Christopher), the one boy who stayed in bed, and the film gets its second wind. Trish Summerville dresses her in a bright wig, a cardigan and make-up a shade too heavy, so that she looks like a children’s entertainer who has stopped caring, and Madigan plays her with a flat cheerfulness that turns every ordinary line into a threat. We will not say what she is. We can say that we laughed at her and were frightened of her inside the same minute, and that Tom Hammock’s design of the house where she settles, curtains drawn, things on the table that do not belong in a family home, does half her work for her.
The music, by Cregger with Ryan Holladay and Hays Holladay, is mostly a low hum under the scenes that now and then jumps at you, and it is used sparingly enough that the jumps land. Cregger’s real skill is the pause before the thing: a corridor held a beat too long, a figure at the back of the frame who has not moved and should have.
Then the last half hour, which we will not describe, except to say that the film stops being a mystery and becomes a chase, and explains its mechanism as thoroughly as a manual. The gore goes up, the comedy goes up with it, and the audience we sat with cheered. We laughed too, and then felt slightly ashamed of ourselves, because the question the film had spent an hour making us care about, why did those children walk out, gets a plain answer, and the answer is smaller than the question. Some critics have called the film hollow. We would not go that far; a horror film owes us fear, not a thesis. But nothing here will follow you to bed the way the running children do.
Set against Barbarian this is bigger, more populated and more confident, and it ends in much the same place, with a monster and a joke. At 129 minutes it is a quarter of an hour too long, and the quarter is in the chapters that revisit rather than advance.
See it in a full cinema for the last act and at home with the lights off for the first hour. You will not get both in one sitting.
