Cobweb (2023)

Little Peter (Woody Norman) is not having a happy life so far. Being without friends and bullied in school is bad enough, but his parents (Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr in wonderfully strained and nervy performances) are a very special case as well. On the surface, they seem to go through all the right motions and say all the right words you’d expect of loving parents, but they do so in a curiously stilted and dramatic manner, like actors trying way too hard. They also don’t seem to have heard about the glorious invention of lightbulbs stronger than a weak nightlight, going by the lack of lighting inside their home. Though they do have a huge thing for pumpkins, which is certainly a point in their favour. As we’ll quickly see, the couple is perfectly willing to go from being creepy to actual emotional abuse when they find a reason for it.

And a reason they’ll find, for this October, the girl living in the walls of the home begins talking to Peter, suggesting some rather radical methods to keep away his bullies, and clearly angling to be set free by the boy. At the same time, new substitute teacher Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman) starts noticing Peter’s behaviour, suspecting abuse, and becomes emotionally attached (which you shouldn’t do, apparently).

For the first two acts, I had a lot of fun with Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb. There’s a wonderful build-up of a creepy Halloween mood where Peter’s home takes on the quality of a haunted castle right in suburbia, with his parents as the local Bluebeards. The visual palette is dominated by the colours of a rather sickly autumn, and there’s much here that feels genuinely creepy. The first two acts really work like a particularly dark fairy tale, even though it is desperately obvious where all this is going to go.

In fact, the third act makes it very clear the filmmakers didn’t really intend this to be the mood piece the first hour makes one hope the film is going to continue to be, but rather a mix of at least three of the more popular horror movies of the past couple of years, Barbarian, The Black Phone and Malignant. Alas, two of these three films have brains, a theme, and the willingness to actually think about the stuff they are showing, where Cobweb’s script (by Chris Thomas Devlin, of the last Texas Chainsaw Massacre screenplay credit) just reproduces clichés without sense.

That’s a failing I could still cope with in a film as moodily shot as this one, if not for the horrors of a third act when the film leaves behind all semblance of logic, art, or even just good structure. Instead, it’s one badly thought out plot point hit artlessly after the next, with characters only brought in because the filmmakers seemed to have panicked about the low body count, and plot holes so big, even I care. That the film implicitly says that locking up your disfigured child in some secret room in your house is okay because ugly means evil isn’t exactly helping there either, in a movie made in this decade. Nor is Bodin’s sudden love for not using light sources at all, so that much of the “action” of the final act is more guessed at than seen. On the other hand, the design and execution of the film’s monster will turn out to be so amateurish, I would have wanted to hide it as well.

Despite how bad the final act is, I’d be rather interested to see what Bodin could do with a proper script instead of whatever the third act of Cobweb is supposed to be. But given the weaknesses of his Netflix series Marianne, this may be a James Wan-like case of fear of decent scripting.