Director: Lee Cronin
Writers: Lee Cronin, Stephen Shields
Stars: Seána Kerslake, James Quinn Markey, Kati Outinen
1 Hour, 30 Minutes
Sarah and Chris are moving to a land where everything is brown, even the green stuff is brown here. The upside-down camera shows us a lingering shot of the land and road. Credits Roll.
They almost hit someonein the road. Sarah gets out to investigate and finds a muttering, black-lipped witchy-looking old woman, but at least they didn’t hit her. They drive on.
We learn that Chris is terrified of spiders. Chris is angry because his father didn’t move out into the middle of nowhere with the two of them. He runs off into the woods, and Sarah follows, but she can’t find him. She walks up to the edge of a huge hole in the ground. It looks like a giant crater, completely surrounded by miles of trees. Chris comes back to her.
They have some friends over, and they mention Mrs. Brady, “Walky-Talky,” a crazy old lady who lives near here. They explain that her son was killed in a mysterious incident many years ago. That night, she hears a noise and finds the back door open, and Chris is gone. Sarah goes out to the woods but can’t find him. She calls the emergency number, but Chris returns just as she starts talking to the guy on the phone.
Chris starts popping up behind her and otherwise being creepy. They run into Mrs. Brady again in the middle of the road. She takes one look at Chris and yells, “He’s not your son!” And bashes her head into the car window. Next day, Sarah goes back to see how the old lady was doing after hurting herself, but finds her dead with her head buried in the ground.
We learn that Sarah has a head wound that still bleeds occasionally. The implication is that she was beaten by her husband. Sarah asks a friend “Do you ever look at your kids and don’t recognize them?”
Sarah goes to the old woman’s funeral and wake. She talks to her husband, who tells her about their lost son, James. Mrs. Brady started saying that James wasn’t really her son when he turned eight. She was convinced that James wasn’t her son, and that seeing Chris reminded her of that. She ran over James with her car, and now everyone says it was a tragic accident.
Sometime later, Sarah is jogging through the woods at night with her headphones on (???) and finds one of Chris’s toys right next to the hole in the ground.She sees (or imagines) the bottom of the hole swallowing the nearby dirt like a big hungry mouth. Chris swears that he hasn’t been in the woods, and then he pushes the heavy kitchen table across the room.
She watches through the crack under the door as Chris stalks, catches, and eats a big spider with his stretchy-claw shapeshifter hands. Real Chris was terrified of spiders but not anymore. She’s clearly afraid of him now. They go see the doctor the next day, and Sarah tells the doctor that Chris isn’t himself. The doctor asks Sarah questions about herself more than about Chris, as if he thinks there might be something wrong with her instead of Chris.
She sets up a hidden camera in Chris’s room. She has this big scene where Chris gets all creepy in the school talent contest, but from out point of view, it looks more like she’s hallucinating it than anything else. It becomes very obvious that Sarah is hallucinating things. Then she looks at the hidden camera from the wall, and then goes to see Mr. Brady.
He says “the mirror always shows the truth” about children. She shows him the camera. He says he doesn’t see anything and throws the camera down. Still, he won’t say that she’s wrong or that she’s crazy. Sarah throws away the medication the doctor gave her. More and more, Chris starts acting afraid of her. We know she’s off her meds, so who is the real monster here?
She puts drugs in Chris’s dinner and then she tells Chris, “You’re not my son.” He throws her across the room and beats her up severely. She wakes up and finds him digging a hole for her. Her buries her head face-down in the dirt. He then passes out from the drugs. Sarah, not being as dead as the old woman was, wakes up and pulls her head out of the dirt.
She drags him back to the house and ties him up. He roars and growls and fights back, but she’s way bigger than he is. He lies on the floor and screams until you expect “Thing”-like tentacles to pop out, but that doesn’t happen.
Sarah finally goes back to the hole in the ground. She goes down into the hole and lets it swallow her up. Of course, she wakes up in a cave. She crawls around in the claustrophobic tunnels for a bit, and then it widens into an area where she can stand up. She finds an old skull, probably James’s. Then she finds Chris. Then she finds the shape-changing monsters. One of the monsters now looks like her. She knocks it out and pulls Chris from the hole. She runs through the woods carrying Chris, and they rest for a moment. Chris wakes up, and they hurry home.
Sarah has to go inside the house (where Fake-Chris was locked in the basement) for her car keys, and she leaves Chris outside by the car. She hears not-Chris in the basement sounding pitiful, so she sets the house on fire. They drive away, covered in dirt but alive. Chris looks up and smiles at her.
We then flash forward to a time when everything is good, and both Chris and Sarah are happy. She takes a picture of Chris, and he’s fine. The camera draws back, and we see dozens of mirrors in the room. They really are OK.
Commentary
The film is going for a mood of depression and sadness, but the brown filter over literally everything was too much. Maybe I’ve been paying too much attention to this over the years, but too many films rely on filters and not enough on acting and story. People raved over “Wonder Woman,” but I couldn’t get past everything looking gray in that movie.
As the movie progresses, it becomes more and more obvious that Sarah’s going crazy. There are several scenes where she sees Chris do something weird (like on stage in front of a crowd) and no one else sees anything wrong. It’s hard to argue that anything is real when the mental issues are this obvious.
There seems to be a big trend in modern horror to frame stories in such a way that you don’t know if there is something really happening or if someone is mentally ill. This is fine if done well, but I thought it was a little clunky here. Clearly, Sarah is having hallucinations between the abuse, the doctor’s drugs, and whatever else is going on, but there also is something wrong with Chris. The real question here is how much is real and how much is imagined, and it’s never completely clear. There are shapeshifting dopplegangers in the hole, and they did clone Chris (and briefly Sarah too), but we don’t really know more than that.