Cobweb

Everything I heard about this movie could be summed up in “a horrific fairy tale” and “you have to go in blind”. I was intrigued but cautious. I heard the blind thing about 2022’s Barbarian, and that was a mediocre People Under The Stairs ripoff, so I wasn’t sure what to expect here. And I’ll be damned if it isn’t another People Under The Stairs riff. Better than Barbarian, but only because it does a great job building atmosphere for the first 75 minutes. The camera work, the acting, the score, it all combined to be sufficiently eerie and awkwardly scary. You know something’s up, but you’re not sure what, and the more it builds, the weirder and scarier it gets. That the audience POV is a child raises the stakes and the tension. What brings this movie down is where everything builds to. The last 15 minutes chucks the creeping terror and atmosphere in exchange for a villain ripped out of a J-horror movie and a slasher-style slaughter of characters brought in just to be fed into the meat grinder. It feels like a completely different sequence in style and tone, and it feels haphazardly stapled onto the movie, not a natural progression of the rest of the movie. There’s also a nagging question of the nature of the villain (human or supernatural?) that feels like it wasn’t answered because they couldn’t be asked to. I would still recommend the movie, as it is mostly effective at what it does, and for some, the sudden kick into overdrive in the last quarter hour might be just fine. For me, it didn’t quite come together to make it completely effective, but it certainly wasn’t a waste of time.