For a film claiming to be a thriller, Shut In pulls more from horror in the most predictable ways it can, whenever it can. It’s a beautifully shot mess that doesn’t know what it wants to be.
Naomi Watts does the best she can as Mary, a widowed child-psychiatrist who live deep in the woods of Maine, working out of her garage. She rarely, if ever, leaves her home that would make Property Brothers proud because her son, Stephen (Charlie Heaton of “Stranger Things”) was rendered vegetative after a car accident caused by an argument with his father who is left dead.
Of course, since the film takes place in Maine during winter there’s a snowstorm of epic proportions coming that may or may not render Mary without power for a couple days. Oddly enough, the audience is left waiting until the last 15 minutes of the film for the storm to materialize, and once it does it plays no part in the plot what-so-ever.
One of Mary’s patients is a 9-year-old deaf boy named Tom (Jacob Tremblay). He runs away from the foster care center one night and ends up at her house. Mary pleads with Tom’s foster care agent to let him just stay with her, but suddenly he’s gone.
Shut In‘s goal is to make the audience question whether Tom is in the house, a ghost is in the house, or Mary is going crazy after taking care of Stephen alone for so long. It delivers on none of this, with a predictable twist that we’ve already seen accomplished in a much better fashion this year in a different movie (click here if you want two movies spoiled).
Mary’s psychiatrist, Dr. Wilson (Oliver Platt) is constantly trying to prescribe her different drugs, and he reveals the twist via Skype towards the end, which is about as anticlimactic and boring as it gets. Watts is constantly fighting with Wilson amongst other characters who think she’s dumb throughout the film, and right at the end she just sighs and gives in to the most basic horror cliches that will make any genre fan cringe in pure anger.
I knew Shut In was in a tough spot when it stealth released this weekend without advance screenings for press, but I was hoping it would exceed my low expectations as a diamond in the rough. Sadly, I was left with a huge sigh of disappointment as the credits rolled. Shut In isn’t awful, it’s just painfully average in a time that it can’t afford to be. If you want to support a horror director at the theater, go see Scott Derrickson’s excellent Dr. Strange instead.
