Released: November 11, 2016
Director: Farren Blackburn
Screenplay: Christina Hodson
Tagline: "Don't believe everything you see"
Cast:
Naomi Watts as Mary Portman
Charlie Heaton as Steven Portman
Jacob Tremblay as Tom Patterson
Oliver Platt as Dr. Wilson
David Cubitt as Doug Hart
Our story centers around Mary, played by the beloved Naomi Watts, a widowed child-psychiatrist whose home and practice are located deep in the woods of northern Maine. Working out of her garage, Mary rarely leaves her home because her stepson Stephen, played by Charlie Heaton of Stranger Things, has been rendered almost entirely paralyzed by the car accident that killed his father, Mary's husband.
To no one's surprise, a snowstorm of Westeros proportions is barreling down on the area and could potentially leave Mary without power for several days. One of Mary's patients, a 9-year old deaf boy with severe, even violent, tendencies named Tom (played by adorable actor Jacob Tremblay of Room (2015) fame, runs away from his foster care home on the night the storm is set to move in, sending Mary on a desperate scramble to find him before the storm arrives in full force. But then, strange things start happening in the house. Unexplained noises. Furniture out of place. Sinister visions at night.
So begins a psychological mind game where the viewer is left to wonder if Tom is already hiding in the house, if it is his ghost, or if Mary is quietly beginning to lose her mind after the mental strain of taking care of her son and the guilt she feels in her decision to send him to an assisted living center after the storm. This is a great concoction brewing here, but it comes out sour. Instead, a predictable twist that was done better in a film earlier this year, The Boy, is what the viewer is left with.
"Blink twice if Eleven's coming back next season"
Throughout the film, Mary's own psychiatrist, Dr. Wilson, tells her about all the different pills she needs to start popping because she's dumb or whatever, and then he ends up revealing the twist to the audience over Skype, which was anticlimactic and frustrating since Mary, who had been fighting back against him the entire time, now starts giving in to every basic horror cliche that make true genre fans scream. And speaking of anticlimactic, that big giant White Walker storm? It doesn't show up until the final fifteen minutes of the movie and then it has no bearing on the remainder of the plot in any way. Cool.
To be fair, I don't think anyone expected Shut In to be all that grand. It was stealth released without any advance screenings for the press, so you know that's always a red flag. But sometimes giving in to low expectations can yield diamonds in the rough so I thought, why not? It's not awful--and there are some fun nods to The Shining (1980) and Jacob's Ladder (1990)--but it is very, very average. Which, at this time of year, you just can't be if you hope to make any money. So I'd say wait on this one and spend your money at the theater on this year's various Oscar bait movies or, if you want to support a horror director, Dr. Strange by Scott Derrickson (Hellraiser: Inferno, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, Deliver Us From Evil, Sinister 2).
Shut In (2016)
5-Totally Terrifying
4-Crazy Creepy
3-Fairly Frightening
2-Slightly Scary
1-Hardly Horror
