Early Halloween horror flick Cobweb starts promisingly before walking right into its namesake

Photo by Vlad Cioplea

Always beware a Halloween film that comes out multiple months before Halloween occurs.

It’s a sign that a studio wants to get a film out ASAP, so that they can not only reap box office benefits but then foist it upon unsuspecting masses again late in the fall. Such is the case with the spectacularly mediocre Cobweb, which suffers from a convoluted climax and frustrating ending.

Peter (Woody Norman) is your typical fluffy-haired genre moppet, the kind of kid that only exists in horror or fantasy films. He goes to a public school, but dresses like he goes to Rushmore Academy and is relentlessly tormented by a bully, Brian (Luke Busey, looking exactly like you’d expect the son of Gary to look). Meanwhile, Peter’s home life is more American Gothic than typical middle-class America. His mom, Carol (Lizzy Caplan), dresses like a headmistress from the 1950s, while husband Mark (Antony Starr) is a mister-fix-it who broods in silence when he’s not slinging dad jokes.

Peter’s life seems placid, but things get creepy when the lights go out. Each night, Peter awakens to a tapping on his wall coming from behind the wallpaper. His parents don’t hear anything, even as the noises grow in intensity. Unable to sleep, his fear begins to creep over into the classroom, where substitute teacher Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman) worries there might be trouble at home. His parents, on edge, blame an overactive imagination. Peter wishes he could believe that himself, but the tapping has grown into a voice giving him instructions and whispering secrets long buried in the past—and, possibly, the backyard.

Cobweb has an intriguing enough hook, but much of the film feels like waiting for a watched pot to boil.

Things keep building and building and building, but no release comes. The movie’s central mysteries are eventually revealed, but open up new cans of worms in the process that the filmmakers have no intention of answering. Why bother, when late in the game you can distract the audience with geysers of blood instead of creating a compelling conclusion?

Though the final thirty minutes is a bit of a letdown, the first two-thirds of the film garner goodwill thanks to beautiful cinematography and strong performances. Philip Lozano’s camerawork creates a fairytale atmosphere, with shadows looming larger than life and figures that lurk in the darkness and push against the walls. Norman, Coleman, and Starr all are captivating in their roles, capable of flipping at any moment.

It’s Lizzy Caplan who steals the show, though, punching well above the material. She loves her family almost too much and when forces threaten to undo the domesticity she’s created, cracks begin to show. Her smile quivers. She hollows out a pumpkin with the veracity of someone rooting through a dumpster for a lost ring. This is the kind of performance that’s the stuff of highlight reels, even though most will have long forgotten about the film itself.

Cobweb’s story struggles fall on the shoulders of director Samuel Bodin and screenwriter Chris Thomas Devlin. While this marks Devlin’s second screenplay effort (after 2022’s hotly debated Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot), Cobweb is Bodin’s feature debut, following his work on the Netflix horror series Marianne.

Maybe the comparatively shorter runtime of TV has Bodin at a disadvantage, though Devlin’s screenplay also gives new meaning to the term “threadbare.”

Were it not for the final 20 minutes of the film, Cobweb could have succeeded as an interesting character study. Bodin does a decent job when the film focuses on the breakdown of a nuclear family, less so when the tone turns towards outright horror. It’s one thing for a movie to invest all its energy into creating a gothic slow burn. It’s another to abandon that conceit in exchange for a studio note that simply reads “needs more blood.”

That jarring tonal shift is further complicated by an ending that suggests 10 minutes was excised from the final cut. When a movie stops caring, that’s when the audience is wise to throw in the towel too.