Cobweb

The bonds of family should sometimes be broken
dir: Samuel Bodin
2023
Cobweb is… less than great, in fact it’s not even close to great.
It barely approaches adequate. Which is a shame. Promising premise devolves into derivative dumbness, like most uninspired horror flicks. Like most flicks, probably.
In the run up to Halloween I will doubtless see a stack of horror flicks, some of which will have Halloween as an element or as a setting. Few will be (I hope) as poorly realised as this one.
Peter (Woody Norman) is a frightened, delicate boy, perfect for a role like this. He has pale skin, gigantic brown eyes and curly brown hair. Yes, he could probably perfectly play a role as Frodo in an inevitable Lord of the Rings remake.
He is (rightly) bullied at school, and his home life isn’t much grander. But whatever happens during the day, his nights are plagued with the inexplicable. He hears a tapping on his bedroom wall, sometimes he hears words being whispered.
His parents aren’t much help. The frazzled, brittle mother (Lizzie Caplan) is high pitched and hysterical even before things go wrong. The father is played by Antony Starr, so anyone who watched the Amazon series The Boys where he plays Homelander knows already that the character will clearly be some version of a charming psychopath.
Less charming, more psychopath. With everything that’s going wrong, Peter suspects that he can’t really trust his parents because, over-protective and violent as they are, they are clearly afraid of something.
One of those things that they’re afraid of clearly should be Child Protective Services, because her fragile Suzy Homemaker bullshit, which never makes a lot of sense since this is set contemporarily and that shit is from the 1950s, isn’t going to cut it. Both parents act like off chops long before there are any reveals, or any reasons given for why they might be acting like this.
The dad especially acts like a barely restrained lunatic right from the start.