Opening with a title card reading ‘One Week Before Halloween’, Cobweb introduces us to a young boy named Peter. Peter is the quiet one in class; he’s clearly being bullied and seems to have no friends to play with at lunchtime. A new substitute teacher, Miss Devine, tasking the kids with painting some Halloween-themed artwork, is taken aback by Peter’s contribution: an ink-black rendition of him alone in his bedroom at night, captioned with an apparent cry for help. Taking it upon herself to inform his parents, and perhaps check in to see if they themselves are okay, Miss Devine is uneasily greeted by Peter’s mom, Carol, and dad, Mark, brought to the screen in full-throttle performances from Lizzy Caplan and Anthony Starr. Whilst Caplan revives her unstable and potentially homicidal turn as Annie Wilkes in the Stephen King smorgasbord-of-a-show, Castle Rock, Starr echoes his memorable performance as the unhinged and most definitely homicidal ‘Homelander’ from The Boys, by way of Jack Nicholson’s crazed Jack Torrance in The Shining. Something sinister is lurking in Peter’s home, and it’s more than just pitch-perfect if predictable type-casting.

Across its first two acts, Cobweb plays out as a psychological drama, with the tension between Peter and his parents amplified with each new snippet of information we learn about this strange and seemingly threatening household. Awoken by bumps in the night and creaks behind the walls, Peter’s parents brush away the son’s fear as the ‘active imagination’ of a young boy. A recent case of a missing girl who lived down the street means that Peter isn’t allowed to trick-or-treat with the other kids, but is this just a case of overprotective parenting or something more concerning?

Director Samuel Bodin will keep you guessing, throwing in potential hints and red herrings that showcase a filmmaker clearly in love with the horror genre. There are references aplenty, with clear nods to classics including the aforementioned The Shining (Cobweb blatantly mirroring iconic shot compositions and camera movements from Kubrick’s film) as well as Nosferatu and The Night of the Hunter. Cobweb is also evidently indebted to the canon of horror-tinged folk/fairy tales – with the work of the Brothers Grimm and archetypal tales like ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ acting as touchstones. Beginning as something more akin to the psychological probings of The Babadook, the film does admittedly shift into something closer to the slasher sub-genre during the final act, a tonal change that some will find preposterous. Without giving too much away, there is definitely one recent big-hitter of the genre* with which Cobweb will inevitably be compared, this new film being its slightly less successful and less surprising younger sibling. Even if, ultimately, the film is undoubtedly derivative of greater works of the genre, there are still enough interesting ideas here to mark Bodwin down as one to watch.

*Click if you want to know what ‘big-hitter’ that is!