- Directed by: Kurt Martin
- Written by: Kurt Martin
- Stars: Jonathan Rhsy Meyers, Alyssa Sutherland, Goran D. Kleut
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 32 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ_b-oAOodo
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
A single mother loses her son to cancer and befriends another boy to take his place. She gets carried away with things and a retired detective becomes interested in the case of the missing boy. And there’s some creature action in the mix but not much. The actual horror is pretty low-key.
There’s a strong cast doing good work, but we both thought it was a long dull slog.
Spoilery Synopsis
Mia works in a diner and gets the call that her son has died in the hospital. Something starts growing on the wall in her apartment. She jumps off the ledge as credits roll.
Several years later, pregnant Mia still keeps her son Axel’s room the way it always was. She writes children’s books, but not recently– she needs another new hit. She starts hallucinating her dead son, but it’s been ten years, so she thinks she’s crazy. She goes to a group grief-counseling session. John, one of the men there, asks her out for coffee; his son Henry went missing a while back.
The next day, she finds a dog in the park and takes him home. She meets a little boy, Simon, and she thinks he looks like Axel. She makes plans to see him the next day, but he doesn’t show up; she imagines all kinds of abuse. She eventually does see him again and invites him home for oysters. She patches up his real abuse cuts and scars.
The dog barks at the mirror. Is something growing there? Mia locks Simon in Axel’s bedroom, which is a cell in the basement. She calls John to talk. When she goes to group again, he isn’t there. Simon makes an escape attempt and Mia accidentally breaks his leg locking him back up again. When she does meet John again, he explains that he’s a detective working on Simon’s missing persons case.
John goes to Simon’s father’s house and finds the man dead, probably poisoned. Meanwhile, Mia has pulled some kind of weird creature out of the mirror and tends to it.
Frank, another detective, comes to see John. John’s not a detective anymore; Frank’s the one who’s supposed to find John’s son. Mia tells Simon that his father is dead, which he doesn’t really believe. Mia hallucinates a monster killing Axel and freaks out.
John visits, and despite Simon being able to hear them talking in normal voices upstairs, John can’t hear him yelling. Later John gets the call that they’ve closed the case on his missing son Henry.
Simon starts calling Mia “Mom,” but it’s just an act while he works on his escape. Meanwhile Mia has another hallucination about the creature getting angry in its room. As Simon gets closer and closer to Mia, he starts acting more accepting of her. She takes him upstairs for dinner and shows him a draft of the book. Simon takes the opportunity when she’s hallucinating to stab her in the belly and starts to leave. But he doesn’t do enough of a job, and she knocks him out with a blow to the head.
Then she takes off her prosthetic belly and goes to bed. With a flashback to when she survived the suicide attempt and was told she can never have more children. Next she imagines going through the mirror completely to a blurry world on the other side.
She tells John she lost the baby, and she has Simon tied up in his bedroom now. She starts chemotherapy on him, with the implication that Axel didn’t have cancer – she poisoned him in her craziness. She sees the monster hovering over Simon that night, and she’s not sure if it’s real or not.
John comes over, knowing something’s wrong, and he gets the feeling that there’s someone in the house. He suspects and wants to help her make it right. Meanwhile, Simon’s lost all his hair and cannot even sit up on his own anymore.
We see that Simon isn’t the first child Mia’s kidnapped; Henry was just one of her previous victims. Mia kills John with an axe and cuts him apart with an electric saw. The monster, Death, finally comes for Simon, who dies from the chemo treatments. On the other hand, Mia’s got another hit book!
Mia buries Simon in the backyard, next to three other graves. Time for another one…
Brian’s Commentary
It’s well-acted and looks good. The plot is pretty predictable; a woman kidnaps a small boy and hallucinates a monster. It’s got some good points, but it’s so incredibly slow that I lost interest about halfway through.
It’s very, very dull.
Kevin’s Commentary
I groaned a bit at John not being at all careful at the point he was figuring things out. As a former cop, he would have known better. He knew she was a poisoner and drank the lemonade she offered. Then when he finds Simon he puts his gun away and kneels with his back to the door.
I’d call this one a case of good actors doing their best in a weak script. It wasn’t very interesting and it dragged on. It got a little more interesting toward the end, as movies sometimes do with a bit of a twist, but it didn’t save it overall.
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