COBWEB (2023)
a review by Evan Landon
Let me get this shit off my chest right now...
FUCK ROTTEN TOMATOES!!!
I'm not going to lie and say that every once in a while, we will agree on some unknown indie film like Lucky or The Lighthouse, but even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while. $50 to sell your fucking soul to a movie you haven't even seen yet is laughable. I knew those motherfuckers were crooked, but now we all know their dirty little secrets since the truth is FINALLY out. They can sit on a screwdriver & figure out which way it turns that works best for them for all I care. Could you imagine if they gave me $50 to not bad mouth them? I'd take it & do it anyways. Fuck em.
This brings me to my point about a little movie that came out a month or two ago called Cobweb that was panned by “critics” because they didn't get their hands greased enough by websites or publications like Washington Post, Rotten Tomatoes, or even the trash heap called Huffington Post. I don't think they really advertised this one in the right way either because I honestly did not even hear about it until it was already out of the theaters. It was produced by Roy Lee who also produced Barbarian, so that might have something to do with it. It is also produced by Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg, but I can overlook that for now.
The plot of Cobweb is fairly simple: a shy, sheltered 8 year-old boy, who is constantly bullied at school, tries to figure out what the constant knocking inside the walls is in his home are, unveiling a dark secret his parents have been hiding his entire life. Is it an original concept? Hardly. The question is “what makes this premise work?” The answer might surprise you.
Simplicity.
The simple things in stories are mostly overlooked or overstated. To find a happy medium, it takes a director who knows how to either completely understand what the writer is going for or is merely linked up with the right people behind the scenes. This is Samuel Bodin's directorial debut and works incredibly alongside Chris Thomas Devlin who also wrote the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie. The less said about that one, the better, but Cobweb ended up on Hollywood's “Black List” being one of the best unproduced films in 2018, so the promise was definitely there!
What really works is the way the lighting bounces off of the walls, almost reminiscent of F.W. Murnau and his work in Nosferatu, as well as the open area shots of the pumpkin patch, that give you a feeling of claustrophobia in a strange way utilizing all that open space to almost feel like you are closed in.
*Spoiler alert* You will be as perplexed as I was with how many damn pumpkins there are in this. There are A LOT! I mean, literally, an entire lot.
Most of the credit has to go to the acting though. It is great seeing Lizzy Caplan doing her thing because she truly is an underrated actress. I especially liked her in Now You See Me 2 and Mean Girls which I have already done a review of. I don't recall seeing Anthony Starr in anything besides The Boys, but if you have ever seen his acting before, you know he can pull off an ominously creepy dude. Woody Norman does a great job portraying their child to which he will probably get a lot more attention for. The real kicker is the actor who plays the bully from school (who gets his just desserts btw) is Gary Busey's son, Luke Busey. Yessir, you read that correctly; 13 year-old Luke Busey is the son of 79 year-old Gary Busey. I'll let you do the math.
It is weird that they did a limited release last July instead of October because it takes place during Halloween , but maybe they didn't think it would do very well. I don't know. There are rumblings that they will do a national release for the holidays, but if it is anything like the measly $5.7 million against a $35 million budget it does not look like that will make it a bigger hit. It is pretty damn good though, in my opinion. There are some decent jump scares, but it is the overall creepiness of it that sells it for me and atmosphere is highly underrated, especially in movies like this.
3.5 out of 5