There’s Something Wrong with the Children (now on Prime Video) reminds us of the delightful adage about what happens when you stare into the abyss. Of course, Nietzsche was speaking metaphorically, but this movie is quite literal in its depiction of a misty old hole in the ground in a crumbling structure deep in the woods, and if I’m not mistaken, this lovely opening into the hoary deeps of the earth appears to be bottomless. Director Roxanne Benjamin positions a couple of youngsters on the cusp of the pit and makes us rather nervous about it in this Blumhouse horror outing that feels like a missing episode of the dearly departed Into the Dark series.
The Gist: These aren’t your typical Cabins In The Woods – they’re relatively plush Airbnbs with no dark corners or mysterious cellars from which terrible things could emerge to perform terrible deeds. That’s the benefit of being able to afford such things, I guess. No, in this story, people need to trek a considerable distance into the woods to stir up mysterious forces or whatever to wreak havoc, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, because there’s some characters to develop first: One couple, Margaret (Alisha Wainwright) and Ben (Zach Gilford), are childless. The other couple, Ellie (Amanda Crew) and Thomas (Carlos Santos), have two grade-school-age offspring in tow, Spencer (David Mattle) and Lucy (Briella Guiza). There’s nothing wrong with these children yet, but something will be wrong with them eventually, or there will be hell to pay, courtesy the Truth in Advertising Dept.’s legal team.
It’s a pretty chill scene. The kids fart around while the adults kick back with a few beers. Ben has a fun day planned for everyone, a not particularly grueling hike through the forest, but it’s nonetheless a hike by definition. He even packed a machete so he could clear the foliage covering the path, and you know the First Rule of Movie Machetes: Any machete introduced in the first act will inevitably be reintroduced in the third. The trail ends at a wall with a window-entrance to an old sprawling creepy-ass stone cellar that’s just inviting everyone to come in and be eaten by bugbears or moss demons or maybe just a whole lotta big spiders. Of course, they climb through and poke around, some members of the party being gung-ho about it while others are more reluctant. And herein they find a gaping maw of a pit that looks, I dunno, hungry? It’s definitely enshrouded by mysterious mist and appears to be so deep that if you fell in, you’d die of starvation before hitting bottom.
Ellie is nervous about the pit, and makes the kids take a step or 12 back from it just to be safe. Oddly, both children get nosebleeds, but I’m sure that’s nothing to worry about, and isn’t a Thing of Ominous Portent, not at all. And then they go back to the fancy cabins for dinner, during which Ellie and Thomas reveal that their intimacy levels have been – apologies in advance – the pits. So Margaret and Ben offer to take Spencer and Lucy for the night so their parents can rock the casbah. Uncle Ben and Aunt Margaret play a vaguely occult card game with the kids before sending them to bed so the adults can smoke a doob by the fire and discuss their own parenthood options, and it’s the usual convo where the dude isn’t sure if he’s ready yet and the lady has biological-clock concerns. The next morning Ben whisks some pancake batter and Margaret opens the bedroom door and the kids ain’t there. A not-quite-frantic search turns up nothing so Ben hustles down the woodsy path to the cellar and finds Spencer and Lucy on the lip of the pit and before he can do anything they hurl themselves into the brume. Ben walks back to the cabins in a daze, preparing to break the news that the kids are kaput and whaddayaknow, Spencer and Lucy come a-gamboling out of their parents’ cabin as if the pit was a portal to the coat closet. What the devil is going on here, and does it have anything to do with the devil? It just might!
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The latest in a very long line of creepy-children horror movies likely wouldn’t exist without The Shining (the kids in There’s Something Wrong with the Children even call the scary demon-hole “the place that shines”), Children of the Corn, Village of the Damned and the like, with some parallels to more recent stuff like Sinister, Insidious and Goodnight Mommy.
Performance Worth Watching: A third-act shift in perspective puts Wainwright front-and-center, and her work here suggests she’s capable of much more than the usual final girl tropes.
Memorable Dialogue: “Luce, stop kicking dead things.” – Ellie chastises her daughter for doing what the screenwriters are doing
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: There’s Something Wrong with the Children shows modest ambition, with a few visual and musical nods to ’80s horror (although the pastiche is starting to wear thin) and some thematic provisions rooted in parental anxiety, whether it’s the fears of current moms and dads or those yet to be. The second act keys on Ben, whose reluctance to meet the challenges of fatherhood is reflected in a situation where only he knows Spencer and Lucy are possessed by mysterious demonic forces, and the subtext murmurs, see, THIS is why I’m not so sure I want to have kids!
But it’s ultimately a thin metaphor, and it quickly devolves into your standard irritating I-know-I’m-gonna-sound-crazy-when-I-tell-you-this/nobody-believes-him gaslighting plot where one character knows what’s really happening here and isn’t quite sure how to convince the others that he doesn’t just need to take more prescription lithium tablets for whatever non-specific mental illness he’s managing. This rickety old plot is what really needs to be kicked down a hole, never to be imposed upon us again.
Benjamin leans on a few too many weary the-kids-aren’t-all-right tropes, from little smiling sideways glances that only the “crazy” character notices to innocent hide-and-seek games that become games of terror with children hissing “olly olly oxen free” in snake-insect voices while adults hide shivering under the SUV (I did appreciate how the shadow of little Lucy’s animal-ears hoodie resembled devil horns). The Carpenterian synth score does a little too much heavy lifting when the drama sags, and the characters doggedly insist on having conversations that dance around the problem at hand, which will drive you nuts. The movie may frustrate the hardcore blood-and-guts audience for taking too long to wind up the plot and not delivering the splatter, but it also isn’t “elevated” enough to tickle the fancy of the A24 dweebs; it just exists in a noncommittal between-zone, and is too timid to take any risks.
Our Call: There’s Something Wrong with the Children is reasonably well done but underwhelming. Unless you’re hard-up for a new horror outing, I say SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.