Mark Reviews Movies: COME PLAY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 29, 2020

Writer/director Jacob Chase doesn't delay the terror in his Come Play. Right out of the gate, the film establishes its central threat, a monster from a storybook that lives in some alternate and invisible plane of existence, and lets that threat get to work.

Chase's story opens with a young boy in his bedroom, silently watching his favorite cartoon and trying to ignore the arguing of his parents downstairs. Late in the night, the boy awakens to the sound of his cellphone's battery being nearly depleted. He adjust the charger, checks on his mother in her bed, finds his father sleeping on the couch in the living room, and pours himself a glass of juice. Upon returning to his room, the boy discovers his phone is ready to use, but there's a strange image on the screen—a digital book that wasn't there before.

The book, employing rhyming phrases and grimly inky illustrations reminiscent of an oil-painted nightmare, relates the sad and lonely tale of a character named "Larry"—a tall, gaunt, and lanky creature. Larry is alone and friendless, watching people through windows and covering his face, lest anyone see him for what he really is.

He just wants a friend. Could the reader become one?

The proceeding sequence, in which the boy seems to have his first encounter with the monster, shows just how well Chase's film taps into assorted, well-established fears—ones that have struck the primal nerves of children and adults for as long as people have been afraid of the dark. The dark is one of them, as the lights in the child's bedroom flicker and then depart. Unknowable sounds are another, as thumping footsteps and low, almost depressed moans announce something coming closer.

The unseen figures in here immensely, as the boy can't see whoever or whatever is making those sounds from the hallway outside his bedroom. He runs over to close the door, and Chase pulls off a simple and efficient but particularly neat trick in that shot. The camera pans, following the boy from his bed to the door and pans back with the kid's return. As he sits in bed and looks up, the camera turns back to the door, which is now wide open again.

This opening scene is simple—a boy trying to stave off and then hide from some real or imagined monster invading his private sanctuary. That simplicity, both of setup and form (The camera stays back, observing the boy and empty space, as the potential threat is established, only to get in close to the child as he hides under his blanket), is why the scene and, indeed, the entire film work as well as they do. It all plays like a long, waking nightmare of things constantly going bump in the night.

The boy, we learn, is Oliver (Azhy Robertson), who has autism. His mother Sarah (Gillian Jacobs) primarily takes care of him—making sure Oliver arrives at school and taking him to a new speech therapist, since he is non-verbal and communicates through a program on his cellphone. She also can't reconcile that her son never looks her in the eyes. Oliver's father Marty (John Gallagher Jr.) works as a parking lot attendant, and the way he seems to keep a certain distance from his son is the source of the current tension between Oliver's parents.

At school, Oliver is mocked and bullied by a group of boys led by Byron (Winslow Fegley), who was once our protagonist's friend until an "incident." The kids lead Oliver to a field after school, where they tease and taunt and push him, before tossing Oliver's phone into the tall grass. Luckily, Marty brings home a tablet from work. Unluckily, the story about Larry—and, for that matter, Larry himself—ends up on that device, too.

The plot is straightforward: Larry keeps coming for Oliver, and more and more people realize that fact. The broader story, which treats Oliver with compassion and looks at his condition with respect, makes this threat feel all the more sinister. Here is a lonely boy—judged and derided for something he cannot help, treated as "different" or some sort of "other," unable to communicate how he is being preyed upon by a supernatural entity (as if anyone would believe him, even if he could). The effectiveness of Robertson's performance is, not only in communicating this character beyond his condition, but also in how we see Oliver being drawn into the allure of friendship—even if it is with a monstrous creature.

All of this adds significant weight to Chase's assorted scare sequences, which are pretty successful on their own. Of particular note is how he uses the camera on that tablet, which can somehow see Larry in that other realm. One scene has Oliver spinning around his room, using a filter app to add a mask to his face on the screen, and briefly and then with rising tension, the app picks up the presence of another face somewhere behind the kid. Another scene has the tablet rising into and falling from the frame, as the screen displays a huddled figure in the corner of a room that can't be perceived with the naked eye.

There are other clever bits, too, playing with the notion of how to make an invisible threat tangible (The way lights turn off and car alarms go off help us to track the monster's movement, and there's an eerie scene involving a laser measuring tool, which counts down the distance as something solid but imperceptible approaches). With Come Play, Chase has made a consistently creepy horror story, but it's as grounded in feelings of isolation as it is in the terror of what goes bump in the night.

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