COBWEB - Mark Reviews Movies

Cobweb, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 20, 2023

It's such a simple, potentially terrifying idea that starts Cobweb: A kid hears something going bump in the night. That notion has become a cliché, obviously, but, as with the most common of our commonplace sayings, for a good reason. The bump in the night isn't scary unto itself. It's the possibility of what unseen person or thing might be doing the bumping that gets the imagination going and the blood chilling.

The big question, then, of Chris Thomas Devlin's screenplay is who or what is knocking inside the wall of a kid's bedroom. In setting that up as the central thrust and core mystery of this plot, Devlin and director Samuel Bodin have fully invested the success or failure of their move in the ultimate revelation of who or what the knocker turns out to be. One has to admire the gumption, but the payoff, unfortunately for the filmmakers and—mostly—for us, isn't worth the process of arriving at it.

The kid hearing the tap-tap-tapping from one of his bedroom walls is Peter (Woody Norman), a pretty normal but shy boy of about 8 years of age or so. He has some problems at school and, beyond the noise awakening and scaring him in the middle of the night, at home.

Poor Peter is regularly bullied by, as it seems, every other kid in school, who tease and taunt and threaten and throw all sorts of stuff at him. When Peter returns to home to his parents Carol (Lizzy Caplan) and Mark (Anthony Starr), they don't either know or much care what to do. Mom pampers the boy as much as her aloof demeanor allows, and dad behaves as if everything else is a better option than spending time with his family.

That's especially true when Peter does start hearing something or someone knocking inside the wall, because, obviously, the kid is going to wake up his parents after hearing it or awakening with startled screams from the nightmares that start to come. Neither of the parents, no matter how long they awkwardly hold their ears up to the wall in question, can hear a thing when each one investigates.

They definitely don't hear the voice of a girl (provided by Ellen Dubin) that Peter starts to hear. She starts giving Peter advice on how to handle the bullies and a warning that his parents aren't all that they seem.

Without giving too much away, the parents do become more of a threat to the boy than whoever or whatever might or might not be behind the wall. The movie becomes a rather unsettling portrait of abuse, as Peter standing up for himself leads to trouble at school, resulting in the father grounding the kid by locking him in the basement.

The parents—Mark in particular—are so clearly sinister here that it immediately becomes apparent that Devlin's screenplay is either giving away too much of the game the story is playing or distracting us from the fact that most of this has little to nothing to do with what's actually happening in the tale. Both options seem unwise in different ways.

If it's just about the abusive parents (which is already a questionable "gimmick" for a generic horror story), is the knocking just a deflection or a symptom of the effects on Peter? If it's something else entirely, that means the pain and trauma of the abuse are being exploited here as an act of deflection, especially during a suspense scene in which substitute teacher Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman) comes oh-so-close to discovering the parents' dark secret.

All of this quickly falls into a reliable, albeit somewhat creepy, pattern. The parents' behavior becomes more erratic and less convincing, even on a practical level—such as one scene in which one of them seems to appear out of nowhere behind someone. Peter learns more and more from the voice behind the wall. The teacher gets closer to making an above-and-beyond effort to investigate what's going on with her student, and meanwhile, the main bully (played by Luke Busey) gathers a gang for some ill-advised revenge.

By the third act, it becomes clear that all of this really exists to get more and more people in the house for a final standoff with the movie's real threat—whoever or whatever that may be. If Cobweb goes out of its way to keep the true nature of that threat a secret, the climax regularly hides it for more pragmatic reasons: It's a silly, unlikely, and fully generic sort of entity that transforms this material into a bloody, illogical mess.

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