SHUT IN (2016)

Studio:       20th Century Fox
Director:    Farren Blackburn
Writer:       Christina Hodson
Producer:  Ariel Zeitoun, Claude Leger, Christine Haebler
Stars:     Naomi Watts, Oliver Platt, Charlie Heaton, Jacob Tremblay, David Cubitt, Clementine Poidatz, Peter Outerbridge

Review Score:

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Summary:

A widow caring for her crippled stepson confronts the mystery of a missing boy while isolated by a winter snowstorm.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

When troubled teenager Stephen Portman throws a tantrum in the passenger seat while being driven to a special school, his father Richard loses control of the car and crashes into a truck. Richard dies and Stephen becomes catatonically crippled.

Six Months Later – Clinical psychologist Mary Portman cares for her stepson Stephen while also working out of her home. One evening, her patient Tom Patterson, a nine-year-old deaf boy, runs away from his group home to Mary’s house. While Mary waits for Tom to be picked up, the boy mysteriously vanishes, prompting an ongoing search of the area by authorities.

Mary begins having waking visions of Tom seemingly haunting her house. Over video chat, Dr. Bennett Wilson assures Mary that she is suffering from parasomnia, a sleep disorder that can trigger night terrors, because her subconscious is projecting her emotions about figuratively losing Stephen onto Tom.

After initially rebuffing his advances because he is the father of a patient, Mary invites Doug Hart to dinner at her house. During their conversation, Mary mentions her plan to have Stephen moved from her care to a dedicated medical facility.

While groggy later, Mary has a frightening encounter with a child’s hand grabbing from a crawlspace before she collapses. In the morning, Mary finds scratches on Stephen’s face.

Mary calls Dr. Wilson to tell him what happened and he reiterates his parasomnia theory. Doug briefly stops by to check on Mary before a forecasted snowstorm is about to hit.

In another video chat, Dr. Wilson chastises Mary because her recent blood work shows signs of self-medicating with Stephen’s prescription drugs. Mary is adamant that there is a mistake. After Mary leaves the screen, Dr. Wilson sees Stephen out of his chair. Unable to warn Mary over the phone, Dr. Wilson gets in his car and heads to her house in the storm.

Stephen captures Mary and ties her up in the bathtub. Stephen explains that he had been faking catatonia for six months because he wanted devoted attention from Mary. Stephen admits that he tried to kill Tom when the boy came between them, but Tom got away and has been hiding in the house ever since. Stephen had also been using his medication to drug Mary.

Mary eventually escapes her restraints and confronts Stephen in the basement as he prepares to kill Tom, who is now held captive. Convinced Mary is trying to replace him with Tom, Stephen physically fights his stepmother. Mary manages to free Tom and lock Stephen in the cellar.

Mary and Tom hide in the house. Stephen escapes the basement by taking an ax to the door. Dr. Wilson enters the house and Stephen stabs him.

While Stephen searches upstairs, Mary rushes to Dr. Wilson. Before dying, the doctor advises her to play into Stephen’s delusion. Mary also finds Doug’s corpse outside in the snow.

Mary gets Tom outside through a skylight. Stephen confronts her. Taking the doctor’s advice, Mary calms Stephen by claiming she let Tom go so that the two of them could be together. Mary then attacks Stephen and escapes outside to Tom.

Carrying a hammer, Stephen chases Mary and Tom through the snowy woods until they reach a pond. Tom falls into the water and Stephen attempts to drown him. Mary recovers the hammer and hits Stephen’s head. Stephen falls into the water and sinks.

Some time later, Mary adopts Tom.

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Review:

By now, there may as well be a formal phrase for the ballooning subgenre of tepid thrillers whose template starts with a single woman in concurrent confrontations with a tragic personal issue and a seemingly supernatural mystery.  What’s a word that could capture such a choking-on-clichés chiller guaranteed to include at least one scene of waking suddenly from a nightmare, slow corridor creeping culminating in false jump scares, a misdirect that it might all be in the heroine’s mind, and a box-of-rocks twist not nearly as clever as it thinks it is?

While we’re at it, there also ought to be a term for the semi-truck that is always speeding in the opposite direction whenever a movie car swerves to the wrong side of a road.  That’s the first of many tropes setting “Shut In” in motion as child psychologist Mary (Naomi Watts) loses her husband and gains a catatonically crippled stepson.

Six months of spoon-feeding Stephen (Charlie Heaton) and changing soiled bedding on her own has Mary contemplating a formal facility to care for the formerly troubled teenager.  If that weren’t anxiety enough, Mary also has the matter of deaf nine-year-old Tom (Jacob Tremblay), a problematic patient who ran away from his group home all the way to Mary’s garage.

Almost as soon as he arrives, Tom inexplicably disappears.  A manhunt is mounted and as days pass in preparation for a blustery winter blizzard, Mary experiences haunting visions she thinks might somehow be Tom’s ghost.  Dr. Wilson (Oliver Platt, almost literally phoning in his role over video chat) thinks Mary just has a sleep disorder.  Yet as waking nightmares intensify and snow seals her inside, Mary becomes convinced that she and Stephen are not alone in their house at all.

“Shut In” comes close to creating a head-scratching starting point for its mystery.  It isn’t immediately clear how Mary’s invalid stepson, vanished patient, impending superstorm, and assorted ancillary threads are planning to combine for suspense.  But when that merge moment arrives to connect every preceding event, what last gasp of intrigue remains is exhaled by a ludicrously laughable reveal.

CONTEXT CLUE SPOILER

The story’s twist is ripped right from the David Cross episode of “Just Shoot Me.”  Except where NBC’s sitcom rightly played the idea for laughs, “Shut In” presents it with a straight face.

END SPOILER

Whoever greenlit the script clearly thought the twist was strong enough to make a memorable and marketable movie, since that’s the only hook it has apart from the cast.  S/he was dead wrong.

Once the cat is out of the bag, “Shut In” has nothing left to give, and it didn’t give much before.  Act three is no more than a lot of hiding in closets, secondary characters arriving on cue to take surprise stabs in the stomach, and more mundane movie conventions than you can unenthusiastically wiggle a stick at.

Pressed for something positive to say, acting is fine, if often disengaged.  Charlie Heaton particularly plays his part well, even when swimming so deep in Edward Furlong angst he practically drowns.  As in “Stranger Things,” Heaton has a distinctly smoldering look in his eyes of bearing a crushingly depressing weight on his soul, yet he is ready to snap into psychosis as soon as anyone dares light his match.

“Shut In” is so paint-by-numbers and bland, even a Thomas Kinkade gallery would be embarrassed to display it.  ‘Uninspired’ isn’t enough of a word to encapsulate all of the useless filler like several single-scene players introduced and then promptly jettisoned or a limp love interest inserted with a forceful shove.

Speaking of words, did we ever come up with one that covers this specific category of commonplace cinema that includes so-so at best fright fare like “The Woman in Black 2,” “The Forest” (review here), “The Boy” (review here), and now “Shut In?”  How about simply ‘forgettable?’

Review Score:  35

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