Jennifer Kent
2014
94 minutes
This is another horror movie with a bit of a misplaced fandom. It's about a spooky supernatural children's book that has menacing properties. Or is it??? Nah, it's actually about the stress of parenting a kid who is spooky and weird and inappropriate, but this weirdness could maybe be explained away through some pretty autism spectrum type behavior (or just plain oddness). His mother seems to go with this at first, but things certainly get worse when the book is in the picture.
The film stars Essie Davis, who was also known as the title character in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, an Australian show about a flapper's adventures in the Southern Hemisphere that you will later end up unknowingly binging at some later point, the circumstances of which will not be addressed here. You will eat a cheesesteak while you watch that series.
There are numerous paint-by-numbers scary children's doll or haunted toy child-adjacent horror films this is inspired by. And even as one of those it's pretty decent for the genre. This one seems to aspire to some twists and ambiguities that are not well-served by being told in film form. It wants to be "The Turn of the Screw" while being somewhat forced into showing you the ghosts, and you end up not forced to decide if things happened as depicted but whether what you were shown was allegorical.
For all its flaws, this is still a good and thoughtful film. You decide to go back and re-read "The Turn of the Screw" after watching this.
Time to choose something different: