I’m not quite sure what to make of “Cobweb.“
On the one hand, it’s creepy and evocative. While it never produces any real jump scares, it maintains a sense of unease throughout its entirety.
On the other hand, once it’s done, and you sit back to think about what you watched, a lot of it feels very forced. For the story to work, so much has to happen just perfectly, which pushes disbelief. And the final twist is a bit of a head-scratcher.
What’s the basic premise? We meet a young boy, Peter, who lives with his strange parents in a perpetually dim house. He starts to hear a voice in the walls, which leads him to doubt whether his parents are being upfront with him about certain things. The plot proceeds nicely from there in ways I won’t get into.
“Cobweb” has of fantasy element, which protects it from the quotidian factors of day-to-day life that would otherwise intrude themselves upon the story. At one point, it’s Halloween night, and we get an outside shot of the house where there are absolutely zero trick-or-treaters. Why is this? Mainly because it’s creepy and the story needs it to be so, and in this case, it works well enough. But that fantasy element does minimize some of the threat.
I felt a plot twist near the third act, where a batch of largely unintroduced characters arrive to beef up the kill count, pushed credibility a bit.
The actors are all great. Antony Starr (who plays Homelander from the Netflix show “The Boys“) delivers yet another horrible man with relish. A concerned teacher is played by Cleopatra Coleman, who stars in the current Netflix show “Black Rabbit.”
In the opening credits, I saw the name Luke Busey and wondered if he might be related to Gary Busey. The young actor shows up about 10 minutes in, and is instantly recognizable for having the facial features of his father, Gary.
So, not a bad film if you overlook a certain detachment from reality.
