A CREATURE WAS STIRRING - Mark Reviews Movies

A Creature Was Stirring, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 7, 2023

The unclear nature of the rules and mythology of the horror of A Creature Was Stirring becomes increasingly frustrating as the movie progresses. There's eventually an explanation for everything in Shannon Wells' screenplay, but it's so routine and predictable that the frustration almost feels more appealing by comparison.

The bulk of the story is trying something a bit weird, at least. It features Faith (Chrissy Metz), a single mother to teenaged daughter Charm (Annalise Basso). The two are stuck in their home in the middle of a six-day blizzard. Maybe it's cabin fever setting in or something else entirely, but the mother-daughter relationship is strained and quite strange.

For one thing, Faith, a former nurse, keeps regular checks on her daughter's temperature (preferring the girl use a rectal thermometer for the best accuracy) and has a regimen of unmarked pills for Charm to take on a set schedule, too. Oh, Charm's bedroom door is also equipped with a heavy lock, which can only be accessed from the outside. Faith keeps her daughter locked up at night and whenever the girl's temperature approaches a number outside a determined "safe zone," which is marked all over Faith's own bedroom, which doubles as a makeshift laboratory, as a range within a low to high fever.

Something is definitely wrong here. Is it the girl? Is it the mother? Is it some thing that occasionally pops into and retreats out of view in the corner of the frame on occasion during the introductory passage? If there is something else in the house, it moves with a low growl or whispered screech, carrying itself on what look like spindly but large legs like one might see on an oversized spider. Again, does this have to do with Charm, or is it some hallucination on the part of Faith, who has a sordid history and clearly has had enough of being cooped up in this house for longer than the six days of this snowstorm?

We more or less find out eventually, although the explanation isn't much help, in part because it's so silly and mostly because it ultimately doesn't matter in the story's bigger picture. The plot has a pair of self-appointed Christian missionaries, Liz (Scout Taylor-Compton) and her brother Kory (Connor Paolo), breaking into the house, looking for shelter from the wintry storm. Liz guilt-trips Faith into letting them stay until the snow stops (The mother bashing Kory's leg with a screw-adorned baseball bat helps the argument, since he needs medical attention).

Wells and director Damien LeVeck dance around the obvious for a while. The obvious thing, of course, is that there is something in the house, and it has to do with Charm, who occasionally has seizures or outbursts of violence when her temperature goes outside that safe zone. Much of the narrative becomes about Liz and Kory sneaking around the house, looking for clues, and eventually finding out that a monster is either inside Charm or has some control over her. The editing of the action and scare sequences is so jumbled that it's tough to determine who's where and when they are where they are, and that makes it quite convenient for the creature to show up exactly where and when its needed for another such sequence to occur.

If all of this sounds like a lot of cheap tactics at play, it most certainly is, but then again, the monster, which turns out to have a wholly absurd origin story, looks especially cheap, as well. The whole affair is pretty shoddy in fact on levels deeper than the attempted formal tricks and the practical effects. For one thing, the material tries to have a sense of humor about itself, but the constant joking comes across as an effort to compensate for the movie's nonsensical nature, instead of being an intrinsic part of it. Kory and his way of turning everything into a joke becomes grating, and if there's a point to the theological debates between Faith and Liz, the filmmakers don't care about them enough to mean anything.

What can be said of a slightly positive nature is that Metz gives a dedicated performance, which the material doesn't earn, and there are divertingly weird sections here, such as flashes of daydreams and fantasies that Faith has to escape the misery of her circumstances. Those turn out to be more important than they might initially seem in A Creature Was Stirring, and if you catch the hint of that statement, maybe you'll also catch on to why the final turn here is so obvious in its foolish pointlessness.

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