Directed by Jeff Wadlow. Written by Wadlow, Greg Erb and Jason Oremland. Starring DeWanda Wise, Pyper Braun, Taegen Burns, Tom Payne, Betty Buckley, Matthew Sato, Veronica Falcon, Alix Angelis and Dane DiLiegro.
Plot: A woman moves into her childhood home with her new husband and her 2 new step-daughters, the youngest of which, makes a startling new friend.
My first statement needs to be that DJ and I DO NOT agree with most critics about this movie. And I will explain all of that after telling you what the movie is about, surface level and what it’s about underneath.
In the beginning of the movie, you discover Jessica (Wise), waking from a recurring nightmare. Her husband, Max (Payne), asks immediately if it was “the spider”. And of course, it was. You are then introduced to Max’s daughters from a previous marriage, Alice (Braun), a young girl who is very respectful of Jessica’s place in her life, and then Taylor (Burns), a 15-year-old who isn’t just rude to Jessica, she’s downright mean and I would have slapped her if I was Max. But hey, that’s just me. He also allows her to almost always have a lot of her torso showing, which also would not happen if she were my kid. But let’s get to the real business at hand.
This newly formed family moves into Jessica’s childhood home. I’m not even certain why they do, but they do. Jessica lets everyone know that she was very happy there for a time and that it’s “hard to lose what you love”. Alice is playing hide-and-seek with Jessica a few days into their move and she goes into the basement alone, finds a strange, little door that she opens up to find a strange, little, teddy bear inside. His name is Chauncey. He tells her so. He also makes her a scavenger hunt list that does not seem insidious at first. He asks her to find a paintbrush and a thing that makes her happy. Later though, it becomes a very dark list, as she is told to get something that makes her sad and even something that makes her hurt.
Surface level, this is obviously about a fucked up friend, who may or may not be as imaginary as everyone believes. Underneath, however, it’s about family. It’s about knowing who to trust and furthermore, who to love and allow into your heart. The girl’s mother, it turns out, was mentally ill and physically abusive, giving Alice lifelong scars. Jessica’s father also went a bit crazy after her mother died, and she has scars as well. It’s something you see the two of them bond over. Of course, there are some twists to the story. I’m not going to tell you anything about them, but I will say that this is the first arena in which DJ and I disagree with most critics. People have called the movie unoriginal and cliched. I’ll tell you right now, the first twist, I did not see coming and I don’t remember ever having seen it before.
The real complications of the story come in when Max leaves to go on tour with his band, leaving Jessica to take care of her new daughters on her own. The neighbors come into play then and are 2 different forms of crazy. Gloria (Buckley) is the normal, baglady crazy that you think about when you hear about crazy, old women. As soon as she opens her mouth, you’re wondering when she’s going to close it. And don’t try to understand everything she’s saying because it’s not going to make sense. Liam (Sato), the boy next door, is clearly suffering from ADD, a possible drug problem and a desperate need for attention. Taylor makes friends with him, eventually, to her own dismay.
I will say that it took us a long time to really care about anyone completely, and most certainly Taylor, who needed to let go of her attitude much earlier than she did. But once we liked them, we loved them and the story got even better for us. To that end, the story is so good, we were in agony over how it was going to finish. We wound up loving it though. Thank you so much Wadlow and friends. We appreciated the oh so realistic reactions by the characters. We appreciated the script that eventually made us love that family. We also appreciated the originality, the rules that were followed, the direction, the soundtrack and the Freddy Claws that came in when it mattered. The opening was captivating and got us right into it all. There was even a hint of LOL sprinkled into the chaos that made the whole thing feel a little less catastrophic.
The cast was charming, but I don’t think I need to tell you that we felt that way. It’s so obvious that we loved almost everything about this and we cheerfully recommend this as a perfect Halloween watch.
Our score: 82
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