Farren Blackburn’s Shut In is a thriller in every sense, a movie so ensconced within its own genre trappings it’s totally unable to give anything new nor have a single original idea. It’s not so much that it’s lifting things directly from other movies. Instead, the film gets down the basics of what a thriller should do — while never mastering any of it. It’s firmly in the M. Night Shyamalan School of Supposedly Clever, propping up so much of its tedious plot on a big twist that’s both convoluted and easy to see coming. What Shut In neglects is literally every notion of creating an entertaining, interesting film.
Naomi Watts — the only compelling thing about this movie — plays Mary, a child psychologist who lives in a remote New England home. The only other resident is her son Stephen (Charlie Heaton), who is paralyzed and unable to talk. She mostly spends her time caring for her child until a deaf boy named Tom (Jacob Tremblay) shows up in her life. Things start to fall apart when Tom goes missing and a nasty ice storm starts to encroach on Mary’s home.
The film then becomes a game of what is and isn’t real, an idea set up by a couple of scenes that turn out to be dream sequences. The film continues to try pulling the rug out from under the viewer in this way, questioning Mary’s sanity and the movie’s own ideas of reality. This is all fine and dandy, but it takes Shut In forever to get there, moving like molasses in January as my father would have said. It’s tedious and dull before it ever gets to the thrust of the action. By then, Shut In isn’t worth all that effort, instead trading in atmosphere for creaky floorboards and Watts looking frazzled.
Beyond all this — beyond the listlessness of the narrative, the hokey, convoluted and unbelievable twist ending and the general mediocrity of it all — Watts truly is the only aspect worthwhile here. Not that it would take much comparatively, of course. But she tries, dammit, which is more than anyone can say about the rest of Shut In. It’s a professional performance the movie honestly doesn’t deserve, since everything the script gives her to do is either dull or inane. I mean, here’s a movie that makes her bend over a toilet and chug baby shampoo — and she does it with verve and moxie. It doesn’t make anything in Shut In verifiably better, but it does ease the tedium just a tiny bit. Rated PG-13 for terror and some violence/bloody images, nudity, thematic elements and brief strong language.
Now playing at Carmike 10, Epic of Hendersonville, Regal Biltmore Grande.
“I mean, here’s a movie that makes her bend over a toilet and chug baby shampoo — and she does it with verve and moxie.” I think that sentence says it all right there. NEXT!