It’s one week before Halloween in a sleepy Michigan suburb and the pumpkins are already rotting in the backyard. For some reason, Peter’s (Woody Norman) suspiciously strict parents (Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr) are intent on shielding the eight-year-old from participating in the holiday festivities, which may have something to do with the spooky and unnerving presence that the boy senses within the walls of their dark and austere home.
Samuel Bodin’s Cobweb isn’t shy about drawing upon the iconography of many a horror film before it—even the name of the town where it takes place is a difficult-to-ignore nod to Halloween’s Haddonfield—yet it weaves a distinctly eerie spell over the audience in its depiction of Peter’s troubled young life. In the film, the boy becomes tormented by tapping sounds emanating from behind his bedroom wall, and after willing himself to knock on the wall, someone or something knocks back in response. Then come the voices. But through it all, his parents strangely dismiss his fears as the product of an overactive imagination.
At school, Peter feels no less alone, as he’s cruelly bullied by Brian (Luke Busey) and a host of other children, whose hatred of him seems largely unmotivated by anything. At its best, Cobweb is thick with that sort of ambiguity, amplifying the suffocating alone-ness of Peter’s journey. At one point, the boy gets expelled from school after violently retaliating against Brian, and his parents respond by isolating him in their pitch-black basement—a form of punishment that firmly establishes Cobweb as, if nothing else, an allegory on parental abuse.
The script by Chris Thomas Devlin, who wrote Netflix’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, leaves quite a few threads hanging, resulting in a curiously inscrutable atmosphere. For one, there’s the presence of the massive pumpkin patch in the backyard of Peter’s home, which is perplexing given his parents’ disdain for the Halloween season. Then there’s the suggestion that the voice behind the wall might have a telekinetic power over him, as when Peter, before retaliating against Brian at school, seems to hear the voice egging him on.
But for as tantalizing as the film’s ambiguity can be in certain moments, there comes a point where it starts to feel at once half-baked and a transparent means of delaying the inevitable—that is, the true nature of what lurks within Peter’s home. A visit that Peter’s kindly substitute teacher, Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman), pays to the home is fraught with grueling tension over what the boy’s parents might do to the woman, but Starr and especially Caplan’s over-cranked performances perhaps make it too easy to answer the film’s central question: Are Peter’s parents gripped by some supernatural force are they just run-of-the-mill abusers?
Outside of a few moments that recall Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” as Peter investigates the truth behind his parents’ antisocial, stringent behavior and the voices emanating from the house, Cobweb largely feels like a knockoff for the first two acts. But for as non-committal as it is during that stretch, Bodin whips up a memorably mean-spirited conclusion, replete with animal masks and gushing blood. And it’s more than apt, considering that it’s billed as being from the producer of Barbarian, that the film induces most of its thrills by persistently hiding the ball and making us wonder if we’ll ever escape its grip.
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