Cobweb: Played

Goddamnit, I got suckered again. I just went through this a month or two ago with Pond, whose trailer looked eerie and unsettling, but as a whole movie was mostly a pompous, nonsensical slog. Sometimes trailers do take the absolute best bits in a movie and string them together, giving you the impression that yes, it’s all going to be like this. Sometimes trailers lie.

But at least with Pond, I was going in blind. Where Cobweb is concerned, I only have myself to blame. Well, myself and the filmmakers. People whose opinions I trust and respect found it disappointing, and under normal circumstances, that’d be enough for me to take that film off the list. But damned if the trailer for it didn’t make it seem spooky and menacing enough that it piqued my curiosity. As much as I heard it wasn’t very good, that trailer kept pulling me back, making me wonder if there wasn’t something to it. Well, the trailer got me again, because it managed to find the good parts of a film that isn’t even really the sum of its parts. It looks good, it has a reasonably good twist, but the execution’s all over the shop.

It's almost Halloween in an appropriately autumnal small town, and Peter is a little boy with a lot of worries. He’s quiet and shy, and thus a natural target for the class bully. But it’s more than that - he lives with his parents in an old, semi-spooky house, full of bumps and creaks as it settles on its foundations, as wood expands and contracts with the weather. It’s hard for him to sleep some nights, and he has nightmares sometimes. One sleepless night, he’d swear he heard knocking behind the wall, even though his mother says he just has a very active imagination. So he gets out of bed, and knocks on the wall himself. Something knocks back.

Something knocks back, and a small voice says “help me.”

The beginning of the film isn’t bad at all. There’s a chilliness to it, and Peter seems like a kid who is genuinely haunted by the shit he’s dealing with. But the problems start early. It seems like what was intended was for the story to start off being about this mysterious presence in the house, but as the film goes on, it will pivot to Peter’s parents maybe hiding some kind of terrible secret. You’ve got the concerned teacher who sees his behavior and when all of the kids in class draw Halloween-themed pictures, Peter draws something that any responsible adult is going to interpret as a cry for help. Is it the thing in the walls? Is it his parents? Is it both? And that’d be fine, but the first big problem here is that for something like that to work, you need for his parents to seem reasonable and loving and normal, right up to the point that the madness makes itself known. That way, the juxtaposition of their apparent normalcy and whatever comes through is upsetting, shocking, an “oh shit” moment. And from the very beginning, Peter’s family doesn’t seem normal at all. Right off the bat, there’s something really odd and off about them. It’s the same problem as how in The Shining, Jack Torrance seems dangerously unstable almost from the first moment he’s on screen, so his descent into homicidal madness really isn’t all that surprising. As a result, there’s no tension or contrast, and instead of an upsetting reversal of expectations, we’re left with a foregone conclusion, and so a lot of the movie feels like an exercise in waiting instead of something shocking and revelatory.

There are also problems with the flow of the narrative. The first two acts are oddly…not perfunctory, but there is the feeling of a bunch of sequences robbed of the connective tissue that would make it feel like a story. It’s one of those cases where it feels like the filmmakers had a bunch of spooky moments, rather than a fleshed-out narrative. The performances are generally stilted (except for Peter, whose actor does a pretty good job with what he’s given) because in part the actors have to deliver dialogue that’s clunky and artificial. Kids do not talk like the kids in this movie talk. Choices are made in the story that I don’t think hold up to real-world scrutiny, and seem made to position all of the pieces in place. There’s an air of contrivance to the story. It looks like things are going to improve in the third act with a pretty shocking act, but what should be a natural gut-punch of an ending ends up being just the beginning of a drawn-out, largely unnecessary confrontation. The climax consists of some pretty stock slasher-movie moments alongside a lot of unnecessary exposition that belabors a point that would have been better served by flashbacks instead of a bunch of stuff being said over and over and over again before the whole thing just sort of…stops. I get the sense that it was supposed to feel ambiguous, but it doesn’t, it just feels like they couldn’t think of a way to bring the story to a close, so they just ended it there. And it’s really frustrating because I see the pieces of what could have been a much better movie peeking out here and there. It’s got the courage to go to some pretty dark places, but once it gets there, it wastes the opportunity on the least interesting choices it could make.

I think this is why the trailer was so persuasive to me – trailers are basically isolated moments intended to sell the film, and this is a film that definitely has some really good isolated moments and imagery – the sheer, baffling strangeness of a backyard overrun with pumpkins, quick asides that communicate important details without being overdone, an impressively creepy nightmare sequence – but that’s all it is, a bunch of moments that never really come together, and what would have been a nice reversal of expectations squandered by letting it play out entirely too long until all of the implied horror is exhausted through over-explanation. Scares aren’t enough. It’s not enough to play the notes, you have to know why they’re being played in the first place.

IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
Available on Amazon