Occult-tinged mother-son yarn covers the same ground as the likes of The Omen and Hereditary, but struggles to sustain momentum
This moody horror begins at a frenzied pitch: a panicked drive down a foggy highway at night, a pregnant woman about to give birth at the wheel. Like her, the story is looking for a new place to go; but it never really finds one. On its own terms, it’s a serviceably creepy slice of occult-tinged mother-son horror, but the story is constantly bumping into predecessors that have already covered this territory, including The Omen, Hereditary, The Babadook and True Detective.
The woman is Laura, played by Andi Matichak, star of David Gordon Green’s 2018
Halloween. After the prologue, we catch up with her eight years later, a stable single mother to an angelic son David (Luke David Blumm), happily living her small-town life. Until one night she walks into David’s bedroom and sees a group of strangers gathered around his bed. She immediately runs for help. When she returns, the people are gone. Did she just imagine it?