There are plenty of fantastic movies about maternal horror — from The Babadook to Rosemary’s Baby to Carrie to the less genre-y but just as horrific We Need to Talk About Kevin and Mommy Dearest — in which mothers (or, in the case of Rosemary’s Baby, mothers and fetuses) and children terrify each other and question notions of indelible parental bonds.
The new Naomi Watts and Jacob Tremblay-starring film, Shut In — whose trailer was just shared, and can be viewed below — looks like a generic addition to an extensive list; but I for one am not above seeing a film that mines the anxieties of parenthood with cheap horror tricks, and this film’s cast is pretty great. (It also stars Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton, aka Jonathan Byers.)
In the film, Naomi Watts — who’s proven, across Mulholland Drive, The Ring(s), and Funny Games that she’s very good at playing terror with nuance — plays a child psychologist who’s currently taking care of her catatonic stepson (who was paralyzed in a car crash in which her husband also died.) As if all that didn’t sound depressing enough, she decides takes in a foster child — played by Tremblay — who runs away in freezing conditions, and is thereafter assumed dead, and seemingly begins haunting her. Or is he? “All is not what it seems,” director Farren Blackburn told USA Today (who first shared the trailer). Tremblay told the publication of his character:
Tom’s a dark character. Not Batman dark. But he’s scared, has rings under his eyes and looks creepy.
Watch the trailer:
Shut In premieres on November 11.