A good atmosphere and great performers are wasted on what feels like an unfinished script. 

The film follows Peter (played by Woody Norman) an eight year old kid who is bullied and isolated at school. His parents (Lizzy Caplan and Anthony Starr) are weird and standoffish. His substitute teacher (Cleopatra Coleman) is his only friend and support. One night he hears noises from his walls. 

He tells his parents, but they tell him its a bad dream. The following night, the noises turn into a whispered voice. His parents react with hostility and aggression. 

I love this set up. The places where you are supposed to feel safest are your home and your bedroom, and the film turns both locations into places of fear and suspicion. 

The movie is dripping with atmosphere. From the rotting pumpkin patch in the backyard, to the dark shadows and dim lights of the house, the film feels ominous. 

The actors are pitch perfect. Lizzy Caplan does a wonderful balancing act of playing aloof housewife and sinister force to be reckoned with. She has such a strained yet tender relationship with Peter, that it generates tension every time she’s on screen. 

Anthony Starr is most well known for playing the deranged and volatile superhero in The Boys, plays the same emotional volatility here. He nails it. He is a dad who can show contempt for his son while telling him he loves him. He plays barely concealed rage so well. 

I’m so sad that the film doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. It even falls apart if you’re half watching while scrolling on your phone. 

Spoilers: 

As Peter listens to the whispering in the walls, he begins to mistrust his parents. The voice tells him that it is his sister. That their parents had her and decided to lock her in the walls because they hated her. 

Peter believes the voice and ends up slipping rat poison into his parents dinner. He sets his sister free. It turns out that he wasn’t crazy. It wasn’t a ghost or demon. The voice really belonged to his sister, who was born deformed and spider-like. She has lived in the walls for years crawling around like a spider and developing her murderous instincts. 

Once she is free, Peter’s bullies break into his house to, I guess, murder him. (It’s unclear what their intentions are. They really only enter the film in the last act in order to get eviscerated by the spider lady. Which they do very well. They get ripped up and destroyed in bloody fashion. 

Sadly, the blood and guts are neither convincing nor well executed. When spider-sister rips off the head of one of the bullies it doesn’t elicit fear, or laughs, or even grotesque horror. It just looks fake. It feels like it’s trying too hard. 

Anyway, Peter’s teacher arrives and together they trap spider-sister back in the walls and leave the house. Cut to Peter sleeping in a new bed waking up from a nightmare that spider-sister is still out there and after him. 

Spoilers over.

Um excuse me, that’s the ending? The ending feels so tacked on and abrupt. It’s like they didn’t have confidence in their psychological thriller/ghost story, and they had enough budget left for a bucket of blood and a fake head or two and decided to overhaul the ending. The real ending though feels so tacked on and false. They just cut to an undetermined time in the future and assume that we will all just go with it? There’s no falling action. There’s no resolution to the story. 

It’s hard to say if the director bailed on his story in the third act or if studio notes interfered, or if this was the plan all along. If the director bailed, then shame on him because he has a pretty good movie going before the third act derailed everything. If it’s studio notes that ruined the movie, that sucks but I understand. That crap happens all the time. If this was the plan all along then that’s just bad story telling. Just a bad movie all around. 

If you want an easy to watch horror movie with a good first half and a terrible conclusion then this is the movie for you. Who is that audience? Not sure. Maybe somebody who is sleepy and wants to watch a spooky movie, but will fall asleep before the ending. If that’s you, then this is the movie for you. 

Cobweb is not my cup of tea. C