Mark Reviews Movies: THE DJINN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 13, 2021

The writing/directing team of David Charbonier and Justin Powell seems to be making up the story, characters, and mythology of The Djinn as they go. The last part seems especially strange, considering that the eponymous supernatural antagonist—commonly known as a genie—has origins and a mythology that pre-date Islam. In this story, though, it's a creature that seems tied more closely to the requirements of the plot than to anything else.

Our young protagonist is Dylan (Ezra Dewey), a kid who has just moved in with his father Michael (Rob Brownstein) after a cryptic incident involving the boy's mother (played by Tevy Poe). There are a few things the screenplay keeps hidden from us until much later in the story, and one of those is what happened to Dylan's mom, who's first seen crying in the kitchen of the house where the two once lived. Dylan goes downstairs from his bedroom but can offer no words of love or support.

He is mute, incapable of speaking following a surgery—if the scars on his chest are any indication. The kid has asthma, too, so it's only a matter of time before a sequence of Dylan trying to retrieve his inhaler before an attack incapacitates him. We may not comprehend everything that's happening in this story, thanks to Charbonier and Powell's intentional and mostly frustrating delays on communicating essential information, but that doesn't make much of what happens here any less predictable.

Anyway, Dylan's dad works as a DJ at the local radio station, and on Dylan's first night in his father's apartment, Michael has a double shift to work. A traumatized and grieving Dylan has to spend the night alone, although he'll soon have some most unwelcome company.

The gimmick here involves an old book on magic and myth that Dylan discovers in one of his father's closets. Skimming through it, he finds a section on the mythical jinn, an otherworldly spirit that can grant a person a single wish—although the request comes with a cost. Dylan wants a voice.

As for the price, the wisher must first survive until the stroke of midnight—a fact that Dylan seems to overlook, considering how shocked he is when the creature eventually materializes inside the apartment. To be fair, the kid also doesn't bother to read any further than the instructions on how to beseech the jinn, and as it turns out, reading the next paragraph or two after that would have saved him a bit of trouble once the jinn does arrive. It also would have helped us to understand exactly what rules the spirit must follow, although those rules become a bit murky in practice. There are, after all, the necessities of a scary movie that must be abided more than any kind of self-contained story logic.

Second, the wish itself is hinted to be one of those monkey's paw deals. That doesn't matter until the finale, when the filmmakers offer one final jump scare and a twist that might have hit harder if the screenplay hadn't kept the full extent of Dylan's trauma as yet another, earlier twist to add more story where there really isn't much.

Indeed, most of this tale boils down to an elaborate game of hide-and-seek, with Dylan summoning and discovering a presence in the apartment, trying to keep out of its sight (and, after the kid blinds the creature, out of its range of hearing), and constantly getting really, really lucky, because the jinn doesn't seem to have its wicked heart in the game in the first place. The spirit is a shapeshifter, taking on the form of assorted people whose picture its inky mist encounters. It doesn't do much with this ability, although it really doesn't do much at all. It is blocked by a locked door, doesn't take advantage of Dylan's coughing fit when it fills the room where the kid is hiding with gas, and otherwise lurks menacingly or hides, waiting for Dylan to get close enough for a cheap and mostly illogical jump scare.

To keep things a bit more mysterious than what's essentially a half-baked home-invasion story with a half-hearted supernatural twist, the screenplay doles out the important stuff: the rules and methods of the jinn, what happened to Dylan's mother, and why he is so determined to obtain a voice. The Djinn fails to ground its attempted scares in any kind of logic—even the paranormal kind—or personal stakes. That failure leaves the movie's gimmickry and shortcuts bare.

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