Shut In (2016)

Directed by: Farren Blackburn | 91 minutes | drama, thriller | Actors: Naomi Watts, Charlie Heaton, Jacob Tremblay, Oliver Platt, Clémentine Poidatz, Alex Braunstein, David Cubitt, Crystal Balint, Ellen David, Tim Post, Peter Outerbridge, Anton Chevrier, Thomas Macedo

‘Shut In’ is about Mary Portman and her eighteen-year-old son Stephen, who are forced to move on with their lives after a serious car accident in which husband and father are killed. Stephen is little more than a greenhouse plant after the accident, but Mary takes care of him with love, dedication and perhaps guilt. When she starts having trouble sleeping and seems to lose sight of reality, tensions mount.

Stranger Things actor Charlie Heaton is cast in ‘Shut In’ as a troubled teenager who is sent to a boarding school by his parents – who are at their wits’ end. We fall in the middle of this fact, so we have to accept this. Apart from a brief altercation in the car with his father, we see nothing of Stephen’s obstinate adolescent behavior. ‘Shut In’ makes a lot of mistakes like that: we’re told what to believe, but we don’t see it.

Mary is played by Naomi Watts. In addition to being (step)mother of Stephen, she is also a child psychologist and treats young problem children in a practice near her home – which is strangely enough miles away from civilization – which is very convenient for her patients. So is the deaf Tom (Jacob Tremblay), who doesn’t send them away after a therapy session without giving him a warm hat and scarf. It is put so much on top that Mary can’t get rid of her motherly feelings, now that her own son is in a state of stupor, that it is not surprising that this Tom gets a bigger role in the story. One night she suddenly finds him in her car, but when she brings him in, he is gone in no time.

More guilt for Mary, which causes her to dream at night that Tom is still in her house. This creates a lot of jump scares, which you feel coming almost to the second before. ‘Shut In’ produces little tension and what contributes to that is the fact that after an hour it is already clear how the fork is in the stem. Because we still have half an hour to go, we have to endure a boring and predictable cat-and-mouse game. The few atrocities intertwined in it do not save the film from mediocrity.

‘Shut In’ builds on the oft-used principle of ‘is the main character mad or is she really threatened?’ Naomi Watts is otherwise fine and makes her uncomfortable obsession for her patients palpable – as implausible as this is. Ultimately, ‘Shut In’ looks too much like other movies in the genre and offers too little to be remembered.