Review: ‘Cobweb’ is Dark in All the Right (and Wrong) Ways
★★★
Moody, tense, enigmatic; Cobweb is a mental exorcise in navigating a maze of perception and plot twists. For some, its tricks won’t work; for others, it’ll fool you right up to the big reveal.
Directed by Samuel Bodin, the story centers around Peter (Woody Norman), a loner kid of the sheltered variety. You know the sort — quiet, reserved, saggy and gloomy eyes that either suggest sleepless nights or, in film language, there is a darkness surrounding him. Peter, of course, has no friends at school but plenty of bullies and his substitute teacher, Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman), worries about him because he draws weird stuff in class. Naturally, Miss Devine suspects something foul must be afoot in Peter’s home life — and her suspicions may be right.
Peter lives in an old two-story house with dirty white side paneling and a fenced-in backyard littered with hundreds of pumpkins of all shapes and sizes, many of which appear to be rotting. The interiors themselves aren’t dirty per se, but they feel dirty. The hallways have a thick musty air to them and as light bleeds into the house’s many dark shadows from the tiny octagonal window, it reveals a layer of dust festering in the air. There is probably mold somewhere and no doubt a colony of spiders nest within the walls. No, this house is not your typical spooky haunted house, at least not in the Hollywood sense, but whether it be a metaphysical presence or a mortal one, there is something haunting it. One night while trying to sleep, Peter is startled by knocking sounds coming from his bedroom walls. His father insists it is rats but Peter isn’t so sure. The knocking sounds quickly go away but are immediately replaced by an ominous voice asking for help and claiming to be his sister, Sarah, who is hidden and locked away on the other side of the wall. But as far as Peter knows, he doesn’t have a sister.
These nightly occurrences are not the only scary thing about this house. Also lurking about are his parents Mark and Carol, portrayed by Antony Starr and Lizzy Caplan, who are, to put it mildly, pretty weird. At first they seem like those overbearing home school parents who won’t let their kids watch PG-13 movies until they are Seniors in high school. But according to Sarah, Mark and Carol are not to be trusted; and it doesn’t take much to believe her. Carol is jittery, idiosyncratic and carries herself in a strange manner that suggests she is either pretending or trying too hard to be the stereotypical nuclear family housewife depicted in ‘50s-era television, and Mark is abusive, prone to anger and acts as though his day job could be serial killer. Both have shifty eyes and permeate a strong sense of up-to-no-goods. In one scene, when Peter asks to go trick-or-treating, Mark and Carol give him a hard “no” and tell Peter about a young girl who disappeared in their neighborhood on Halloween night a few years back. Oh, we don’t want that to happen to you, they say in a way that sounds almost like a threat. You could believe Mark and Carol showed some real concern for Peter’s well-being if they didn’t dish out harsh punishments like locking him in the basement for an entire day or two. Suffice to say, between their erratic behavior and Sarah’s claims, young Peter becomes convinced that Mark and Carol may not simply be awful parents — they may in fact be evil.
Is Cobweb scary? It depends on how you define “scary.” The film isn’t a series of jump scares, one lined up after another. But it is creepy and unsettling; one of its more teeth-clattering moments comes when Miss Devine knocks at Peter’s front door for a well-being check. She is greeted by Carol, who is as anxious, annoyed and insistent on not letting Miss Devine inside, and Mark, who has murky eyes and seems all too eager to invite her in as he wields a hammer in his hand. There is also a corker of a fright where Mark and Carol invade one of Peter’s nightmares in the form of demonic entities that attack him the dark, which is without a doubt the film’s scariest scene.
For its first two-thirds, Cobweb serves up a slow but tense build up with frights that are more restrained and psychological in nature, but like a sudden jolt from a jack-in-a-box, the film unleashes its mayhem in the final half hour where it cranks up its level of shocks, scares and surprises tenfold. At this point, it almost becomes another movie entirely as the tone becomes more aggressive and its body count starts to rack up. Hair dragging across the floor, bodies moving about with heads lopped off, a monstrous figure picking off characters one by one; it even features the world’s smallest door creak. Too bad you really can’t see most of it.
For whatever reason — a sense of realism perhaps — the filmmakers decided to light these scenes with as little visibility as possible, which is a shame because you can tell Bodin and screenwriter Chris Thomas Devlin had some really mischievous scares planned for us. This movie even features one of the best Jack O’ Lantern gags I have (almost) ever seen and I nearly (i.e. mostly) missed it because it took until the last frame for my eyes to glimpse the severed head inside it. (Cobweb, of course, is R-rated but you wouldn’t tell because you can barely see the blood.) Unfortunately, this decision is something of a mood-killer on the film’s final act as it completely dulls the suspense of an otherwise gnarly climax and renders it disappointing. After all, how can you be scared if you can’t see the scares?
What is puzzling about these dark, low contrast scenes is that the cinematography (by Philip Lozano, who previously worked on Blood Machines and Bodin’s Netflix series Marianne) is quite good throughout the rest of the film, particularly the daytime fall exteriors which make you yearn for sweaters, warm cider and carving pumpkins. My favorite shot, however, is when Peter eavesdrops on his parents while they are having a discussion about him. In this scene, Lozano frames Peter, a tiny figure trapped on the stairs, between two monolith silhouettes visually representing the child’s vulnerability and the intimidating nature of his parents. Also, given the type of stairs and the way in which they are illuminated, one cannot help but be reminded of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu.
The far-too-darkly lit final act, coupled with the distributor’s boneheaded decision to release the film on as few screens as possible on the same day as the viral and extremely lucrative Barbieheimer phenomenon, is a great disservice to an otherwise fantastic horror film that for some reason, neither the studio nor some of the creatives involved it seems want you to see. I was one of the lucky ones whose local theater was actually showing the film and I must say, it had me in its wickedly sharp claws right up until the very end; but it wasn’t any plot twist nor the sudden abrupt ending that lost me but rather how these scenes were shot. On another weekend and with better contrast, Cobweb could have been the most talked-about Halloween horror film of the year.
