Shut In

It is actually pretty scary and unnerving. It has been a LONG time since a movie made me feel distress in this manner.

The suspense in this movie is really well done. It actually gives me that sense of dread, and that rarely ever happens anymore. I know shit is coming, because the idiotic sound team makes sure of it, but they let the "sit" go long enough, and in different intervals each time, to keep you guessing on when the scare is going to come.

That is the whole thing right there, and it is the part almost nobody gets right. A scare is not the bang. It is the length of the wait in front of the bang, and whether you can predict that length. Keep the interval the same and the audience starts counting with you, and once they are counting they are not scared, they are waiting. Vary it and they cannot settle, which is what dread actually is.

The call, made at about forty minutes in. The main woman has night terrors about a kid that went missing; she was apparently the last one to see him alive, and now she thinks the ghost of the kid is haunting her and fucking shit up. All the while her basically braindead stepson is in a wheelchair. I can already kind of see that the stepson is not as much of a vegetable as he is playing at, and that it is going to be him terrorizing her in her sleep.

Second call, same sitting. I am also thinking the Oliver Platt character might have something to do with it, because he is sort of gaslighting her about what she thinks she is seeing and hearing, explaining it away the way an unbelieving psychologist would.

Called it. It is the kid in the wheelchair. Oliver and the mom just had a video call, and after she got all pissed off and left, from him accusing her of taking pills, the video did not cut off, and he saw the empty wheelchair and the kid run by the doorway. So the first call was right and the second one was wrong. He is not in on it, he is the one who finds out.

Third call. I have a feeling Oliver's character is going to die. He went racing up to her house after calling the cops and ran off the road, because it is a snow storm. I think he is going to come up on the stepson and he is going to get got.

The other thing I forgot to mention. The boy that went missing is alive and living in the crawl space of the house. The stepson tried to deal with the kid, locking him in until he starved to death, but the kid managed to survive and is still in the walls.

Called that one too. Oliver just got knifed in the gut by the stepson and ended up in the wheelchair, bleeding out. Apparently he killed the dude that was interested in the mom, too. She just found the body out the back door, lol.

The motive gets said out loud and often. The dialogue they have the kid say all the time is that it just needs to be him and her. And Platt is still alive in the chair, telling her how to deal with the kid's nonsense until the cops arrive. And then he dies.

The ending is the failure. The stepson dies because she kills him while he is trying to drown the boy. But then it flips to her and the boy showing up at a school, framed like she is taking care of him now, with no explanation of where his parents went.

You cannot just end a movie like that. Some bullshit unexplained happy ending. They did not even bother to put cop lights in the background after she rescued the boy from the lake. LAZY AS FUCK ending that seemed like it was hurried along and pushed out, or some sort of fucked compromise.

And the release history backs the compromise read. This film was dated four separate times before it came out: February 2016, then June, then September, then November. A finished picture does not get moved four times because everyone is happy with it.

Five percent on Rotten Tomatoes, 25 on Metacritic, a C from CinemaScore and a Razzie nomination for the lead. The reviews called the plot cliched and said it had no thrills.

The plot is cliched. That part is true, and I called most of it from forty minutes out. But "no thrills" is a different claim and it is wrong, because the thing this film does best is the one thing those reviews did not look at. The intervals are built. Somebody in that cutting room knew exactly what they were doing with the length of a pause, and they did it over and over for eighty minutes, and then the last ten minutes threw it away.