IT FEEDS - Mark Reviews Movies

It Feeds, Samuel Goldwyn Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 18, 2025

Writer/director Chad Archibald seems to have put more thought and effort into the opening scene of It Feeds than anything else in the movie. If the rest of the movie approached the eerie mood and sinister implications of its prologue, the filmmaker might have been on to something.

Instead, the material becomes little more than some undercooked supernatural gimmickry and a string of jump-scares. It's too silly to be taken seriously, so Archibald's mostly somber approach doesn't do it any favors, either.

The basic setup features Cynthia (Ashley Greene), a self-employed psychic/psychologist who can look into the minds of her clients, by way of some kind of extreme and fast-acting form of mutual hypnosis, and uncover hidden trauma. That's an intriguing conceit, to be sure, especially when it's introduced by way of an opening sequence that has Cynthia exploring the warped, nightmarish memories of a man who knows something terrible happened to him in childhood. Cynthia's tour of her client's mind has her wandering a grim school, following the anguished cries for help from a child, and discovering a wolf-like predator in an office, blowing smoke with his growls and holding kids in cages.

With that striking scene out of the way, Archibald essentially skips past the psychological angle and visual inventiveness of his gimmick once a new potential client barges into Cynthia's home. She's Riley (Shayelin Martin), a teenage girl who is certain there's something evil inside her. Cynthia's daughter Jordan (Ellie O'Brien), a psychic-in-training, does a brief interview with the girl, who claims that the dark presence that has haunted her is in the room with them. Cynthia calls off the whole thing immediately when she enters the room and spots the damned creature—a dark, grimy figure with a tangle of long hair and penchant for shrieking whenever someone notices it.

Is this entity a demon or some embodiment of a physical/mental illness? Archibald wisely doesn't try to force an explanation upon thing, but he's also too happy to let the creature serve whatever purpose the filmmaker needs it to at any moment. It's a demonic thing, to be sure, that hovers around Riley and anyone unfortunate enough to be able to see it (except, conveniently, for Cynthia), seemingly waiting around to catch its victim off guard and scream directly at the person.

The movie's cheapest trick might be the way it suddenly raises the volume whenever one of those scare moments occurs. It's as if Archibald believes that the eardrums are the most direct path to a viewer's fight-or-flight response. The tactic works on occasion, although, once the initial startle quickly resolves itself, one might be more scared about any potential hearing damage that might result if the theater's sound system levels are too high.

Anyway, Jordan sympathizes with the terrified girl, since she lost her mother to a mysterious illness and her father Randall (Shawn Ashmore) doesn't seem to want to address the supernatural force terrorizing his daughter. She sets off on her own to find Riley and try to help her, but upon arriving at the girl's house, she discovers that Randall is actually attempting to aid his daughter—only in a way that gives the demon-like thing other victims upon whom to focus and feed.

Apart from one surprising development that puts an end to the creature's hold on the girl, the rest of the plot amounts to Cynthia, along with her random pseudo-comic-relief sidekick Agatha (Juno Rinaldi), trying to find Jordan, before finding her and having to track her down yet again. See, the monstrous entity becomes attached to the daughter, leaving her to be the one frightened by its sudden appearance in front of her a couple of times.

Eventually, the screenplay returns to the gimmick that started it, having Cynthia enter a mind or two to find Jordan and to confront the demon directly, even though its presence is more of a physical matter than a psychological one. Again, the thing is whatever Archibald requires it to be, and if the creature is suddenly going to be a metaphor for depression or trauma so that Cynthia can pull off the psychic equivalent of a dream-within-a-dream at some point, so be it.

Everything about the material becomes overly simplistic, from the haphazard mythology of the creature to the atmosphere of the movie, which doesn't do enough visually to separate the dim reality of various settings from the dim nightmares in which Cynthia finds herself. It Feeds has one decent idea, but after its first scene, the movie never takes advantage of that conceit's potential.

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