“Shut In” comes close to creating a head-scratching starting point for its mystery. Yet as waking nightmares intensify and snow seals her inside, Mary becomes convinced that she and Stephen are not alone in their house at all. Wilson (Oliver Platt, almost literally phoning in his role over video chat) thinks Mary just has a sleep disorder. A manhunt is mounted and as days pass in preparation for a blustery winter blizzard, Mary experiences haunting visions she thinks might somehow be Tom’s ghost. If that weren’t anxiety enough, Mary also has the matter of deaf nine-year-old Tom (Jacob Tremblay), a problematic patient who ran away from his group home all the way to Mary’s garage.Īlmost as soon as he arrives, Tom inexplicably disappears. Six months of spoon-feeding Stephen (Charlie Heaton) and changing soiled bedding on her own has Mary contemplating a formal facility to care for the formerly troubled teenager. That’s the first of many tropes setting “Shut In” in motion as child psychologist Mary (Naomi Watts) loses her husband and gains a catatonically crippled stepson. While we’re at it, there also ought to be a term for the semi-truck that is always speeding in the opposite direction whenever a movie car swerves to the wrong side of a road. What’s a word that could capture such a choking-on-clichés chiller guaranteed to include at least one scene of waking suddenly from a nightmare, slow corridor creeping culminating in false jump scares, a misdirect that it might all be in the heroine’s mind, and a box-of-rocks twist not nearly as clever as it thinks it is? Stephen falls into the water and sinks.īy now, there may as well be a formal phrase for the ballooning subgenre of tepid thrillers whose template starts with a single woman in concurrent confrontations with a tragic personal issue and a seemingly supernatural mystery. Mary recovers the hammer and hits Stephen’s head. Tom falls into the water and Stephen attempts to drown him. Mary then attacks Stephen and escapes outside to Tom.Ĭarrying a hammer, Stephen chases Mary and Tom through the snowy woods until they reach a pond. Taking the doctor’s advice, Mary calms Stephen by claiming she let Tom go so that the two of them could be together. Mary gets Tom outside through a skylight. Mary also finds Doug’s corpse outside in the snow. Before dying, the doctor advises her to play into Stephen’s delusion. While Stephen searches upstairs, Mary rushes to Dr. Wilson enters the house and Stephen stabs him. Stephen escapes the basement by taking an ax to the door. Mary manages to free Tom and lock Stephen in the cellar. Convinced Mary is trying to replace him with Tom, Stephen physically fights his stepmother. Mary eventually escapes her restraints and confronts Stephen in the basement as he prepares to kill Tom, who is now held captive. Stephen had also been using his medication to drug Mary. Stephen admits that he tried to kill Tom when the boy came between them, but Tom got away and has been hiding in the house ever since. Stephen explains that he had been faking catatonia for six months because he wanted devoted attention from Mary. Stephen captures Mary and ties her up in the bathtub. Wilson gets in his car and heads to her house in the storm. Wilson chastises Mary because her recent blood work shows signs of self-medicating with Stephen’s prescription drugs. Doug briefly stops by to check on Mary before a forecasted snowstorm is about to hit. Wilson to tell him what happened and he reiterates his parasomnia theory. In the morning, Mary finds scratches on Stephen’s face. While groggy later, Mary has a frightening encounter with a child’s hand grabbing from a crawlspace before she collapses. During their conversation, Mary mentions her plan to have Stephen moved from her care to a dedicated medical facility. Bennett Wilson assures Mary that she is suffering from parasomnia, a sleep disorder that can trigger night terrors, because her subconscious is projecting her emotions about figuratively losing Stephen onto Tom.Īfter initially rebuffing his advances because he is the father of a patient, Mary invites Doug Hart to dinner at her house. Mary begins having waking visions of Tom seemingly haunting her house. While Mary waits for Tom to be picked up, the boy mysteriously vanishes, prompting an ongoing search of the area by authorities. One evening, her patient Tom Patterson, a nine-year-old deaf boy, runs away from his group home to Mary’s house. Six Months Later – Clinical psychologist Mary Portman cares for her stepson Stephen while also working out of her home. Richard dies and Stephen becomes catatonically crippled. When troubled teenager Stephen Portman throws a tantrum in the passenger seat while being driven to a special school, his father Richard loses control of the car and crashes into a truck.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |