But with twists of fate even Stephen King would blanch at and think both too contrived as well as overly cold-blooded, Shut In never becomes more than the sum of its overly familiar genre parts. The acting is thankfully good enough that watching the film is hardly a chore, and at barely 90 minutes the whole thing is over and done with so quickly lingering on its missteps for any longer than a second or to feels like a decided waste of time. But even more damning? Hodson does a terrific job of showing her protagonist to be a strong mother and devoted therapist only to make those points moot as events spiral towards conclusion, thinking a couple throwaway lines of dialogue are all that’s necessary to make it all right. Worse than that, she establishes Mary as a complex, highly intelligent woman so the fact she never figures out what is happening is close to insulting. It relies upon a conceit that’s just not believable, and much like last January’s The Boy, the climactic twist around which everything revolves around is just too silly to take with even an ounce of seriousness. At the same time, he’s also a big fan of tossing in pointless jump scares almost anytime he can, inadvertently diluting their power, and as such the one time one of these parlor tricks is genuinely required, the impact it had on me and most of the preview audience I watched the film with was disappointingly muted to say the least.īut it is Christina Hodson’s script that is most problematic. Director Farren Blackburn ( Hammer of the Gods) does his best Roman Polanski imitation, utilizing a series of rather long takes, allowing cinematographer Yves Bélanger’s ( Brooklyn) camera to explore the chilly interiors of Mary’s home with unnerving exactitude. The problem is, as terrific as the cast might be, as wonderful as the early sequences showcasing the horrifying auto accident and Mary’s daily travails trying to navigate its gruesome aftermath might be, the truth of the matter is that this supposedly haunting suspense flick is really rather boring. And, of course, there’s also Watts, the two-time Academy Award nominee a bona fide superstar who, having helped make 2002’s The Ring a bona fide international sensation and was more than willing to explore the cerebral nasty side of human nature in David Lynch’s 2001 classic Mulholland Dr., is no stranger to trying to elicit a few gasps of unbridled terror from a wide-eyed audience. “Stranger Things” star Heaton is an up-and-coming young actor who oozes talent, young Tremblay knocked all of our collective socks clean off just last year in Room, while any movie that allows Platt to cut loose, if even only just a little bit, can never be all bad. Worse, she thinks it might be Tom, and with authorities believing the boy might have died out there in the woods it only makes sense his spirit would be out seeking vengeance, even if his target is the only adult who ever went of her way to show him kindness and compassion.Ĭonsidering the quality of the cast, the cerebral suspense-thriller Shut In actually has quite a bit going for it. Mary comes to believe there is a ghost haunting her and Stephen. This causes the psychologist to begin questioning everything she does, not to mention her own personal sanity, especially after things start happening inside her home that defies any simple explanations. With a major winter ice storm about to hit, things begin to go haywire for Mary after one of her former patients, partially deaf nine-year-old orphan Tom ( Jacob Tremblay), goes missing in the forest next to her house.

Cast of shut in 2016