As the new horror film Cobweb opens, Peter (Woody Norman), a lonely and bullied eight-year-old boy is woken up in the middle of the night in the creepy old house where he lives with his parents, Carol (Lizzy Kaplan) and Mark (Antony Starr), by strange sounds emanating from his bedroom walls that seem to respond when he knocks on them. Naturally, he is terrified but Carol, perhaps a little too insistently, tucks him back in while insisting it was all his imagination. That is not the case, of course, and the next night, he hears the voice of a young girl begging him to help release her from the wall. When he turns in a nightmarish drawing as part of a school assignment, Peter’s well-meaning substitute teacher, Miss Divine (Cleopatra Coleman), turns up at the house to see if he is all right, a move that seem to unnerve Carol even more. Later, when the voice encourages Peter to defend himself against his bully—a move that goes badly enough to lead to his expulsion—his parents respond to his transgression in a shocking manner that forces him to consider that they are not quite what they seem. However, is the voice in the wall really his friend or does it have a secret and potentially monstrous agenda of its own?
Cobweb was filmed in 2020 and I suspect that it is only getting released now in the hopes that it might click with audiences in the way that last year’s unexpected horror hit Barbarian—another story involving strange houses containing terrifying secrets that gets progressively weirder as it goes on—did. While I thought that Barbarian was pretty preposterous—while I admired the nerve of its wild narrative swings, I never felt that any of them quite connected as anything other than as examples of sheer weirdness—I think that Cobweb is a somewhat more inspired take, at least for a little while. The first half is actually pretty good in a number of ways—the screenplay by Chris Thomas Devlin (the guy responsible for last year’s misbegotten Texas Chain Saw Massacre revival) sets up the story and Peter’s plight in an interesting manner, director Samuel Bodin evokes a quiet sense of dread that is fairly effective, especially in the ways in which he plays with light and shadow during the scarier moments, and the performances from the four key players are good (especially Kaplan, who manages to convey her character’s mounting hysteria without tripping over into full-on camp). Unfortunately, the second half, in which the various secrets regarding what is going on are finally unraveled, proves to be a lot less interesting as the tone shifts from slow-burn suspense to all-out gore fest (with the bully and his brutish cousins turning up for no other logical reason than to up the body count) and Bodin and Devlin demonstrate that they are ultimately more interested in setting up a potential sequel in the final moments that in really dealing with the horrifying implications of their story. Ultimately, Cobweb doesn’t quite work well enough to warrant a full recommendation but it has just enough points of interest to make it worth considering for genre fans, provided that they go in with lowered expectations.
Earth Mama, the debut feature from writer-director Savanah Leaf, is a film that take viewers on a wrenching, eye-opening exploration of the foster care system and the myriad ways that it almost seems to be designed to tear families caught up in it apart without ever offering them a reasonable path for escaping it. The focus is on Gia (Tia Nomore), a young woman who lives in an impoverished area of Oakland and whose past issues with drugs have led to her two children being put into the system, offering her only one hour a week of highly supervised visitation that make it difficult to develop any sort of bond with them. With a third child on the way, she diligently attempts to turn her life around but is up against a collection of standards that is all but impossible to live up to—she somehow needs to work enough hours to maintain child support, attend obligatory correctional courses and take a regular series of sobriety tests, a crushing litany of obligations that offer little in the way of tangible help regarding her current position or her hopes for the future. Feeling hopeless, she begins to consider the notion of putting her upcoming child up for adoption in the hopes that doing so will give it a chance at a better life.
As you can probably guess, Earth Mama is a fairly bleak film in many ways as we witness Gia—who knows that she has messed up in the past but who genuinely wants to do whatever is necessary to get her children and dignity back—as she tries to navigate all of the obstacles in her path without succumbing to the seeming hopelessness of her situation or giving up on the brief dreams of personal freedom that she grants herself in those rare moments where she indulges in her own thoughts. And yet, as grim as it gets for her in her efforts to do the right thing, Leaf is careful to give Gia some moments of relief, here mostly through the efforts of old friend Mel (Keta Price)—the kind of pal who will drop everything in a heartbeat in order to help assemble a crib—and Carmen (Erika Alexander), a social worker who recognizes the massive flaws of the system that she is nevertheless a part of and who tries to be as supportive as she can towards Gia so that she does not slip back into the habits that brought her to this in the first place. Smart, tough, moving and blessed with one of the more memorable performances of the year to date in Nomore’s turn as Gia (where she embodies her character to such a convincing degree that there is never a moment when you can see her doing any “acting” per se), Earth Mama may not necessarily be the kind of film that most people would voluntarily choose to unwind with at the end of a long day, but it is nevertheless a necessary and vital work that excels at both telling a compelling and touching story and in serving as a call to arms against a system that needs to be quickly and radically revamped in order to give people like Gia a genuine chance of making a fresh start.
In his two previous films, Out of the Blue and House of Darkness, has employed classic genre film frameworks as a way of further delving into his often-corrosive take of gender dynamics that fueled such earlier works of his as In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors and The Shape of Things with wildly varying results—while the horror-tinged House of Darkness offered up some interesting ideas within the context of a genre that has its own issues in regards to its treatment of women, Out of the Blue was little more than a tedious exercise in film noir cliches that was so forgettable that it practically evaporated from your mind as you watched it. (At least his much-maligned and frankly misunderstood remake of The Wicker Man had the dignity to be strange enough to stick in your memory, whether you wanted it to or not.) With his latest film, Fear the Night, he utilizes this approach once again, this time within the context of a fairly traditional home invasion narrative. Maggie Q stars as Tess, an Iraq War vet struggling with PTSD, alcoholism and a fraught relationship with sister Beth (Kat Foster), all of which are tested when the two of them go off to a remote farmhouse their family owns to throw a bachelorette party for their younger sister (Highdee Kuan) with a few other friends. Between a run-in with some thuggish guys at a convenience store and Beth’s constant carping, Tess is already on edge when the party is brutally interrupted by a group of unknown and decidedly violent men who make their presence known by firing arrows into the house and demanding to be let in so that they can take something from inside. Realizing that the guys, despite saying otherwise, are not going to let them out alive, Tess’s skill set kicks into gear and she begins doing what she can to take out the invaders one at a time and in increasingly grisly manner.
Of LaBute’s three recent genre experiments, I would rank Fear the Night somewhere in the middle. On the down side, it feels like a strangely impersonal project for someone with a voice as distinctive as LaBute—so much so, in fact, that if you somehow missed his name in the opening credits, you would have no indication that it was made by him. The narrative is as generic as can be, most of the characters—male and female alike—are stridently annoying and unlikable and even the moments of grisly violence are not much to write home about. (Frankly, the sound design winds up doing nearly all of the work in this regard.) On the other hand, while LaBute is clearly not really investing much of himself this time out, he nevertheless keeps things moving in a reasonably slick and efficient manner and, in a rarity for contemporary American cinema, he concludes things with an epilogue that actually serves a genuine dramatic purpose and is not simply there to add a final pseudo-ironic twist or set up a sequel. More significantly, he is lucky to have Maggie Q, whose performance here as Tess is undeniably strong and sure. She is, of course, fiercely convincing during the action beats in which she gruesomely dispatches her attackers but she is just as believable during the more straightforward dramatic moments as well, which is all the more impressive since she is giving her scenes and character a depth that LaBute himself didn’t quite manage to supply. Fear the Night never quite comes together into something that works either as a metaphor for contemporary gender issues or as a straightforward genre piece but as a vehicle for Maggie Q to show her stuff, it is not without interest.