Director: Tucia Lyman
Writer: Tucia Lyman
Stars: Melinda Page Hamilton, Edward Asner, Julian de la Celle
Link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8186932/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Synopsis
Releases March 13, 2020
We start out with a mother watching an old video of when their very young son killed some animal. “Did you do this on purpose?” “What’s on purpose?”
Now that Jacob has gotten older, and weirder, his mother has started recording his outbursts on video. She says that he destroyed seven pairs of her high heels because he doesn’t like the sound high heels make. Jacob has another story: that she was drunk and cut up her own shoes. We can see on her computer that she has hundreds of short videos of things he’s done. She suspects that Jacob is going to… she can’t even say it. He has an architect’s drawing of the school’s floorplans and a bunch of gun magazines.
She tells the camera all of her concerns, and then walks us through his bedroom. She wants to show us what’s in his closet, but the door is locked. She sets up a hidden camera in the living room so she can record better shots of her son.
She takes away his Playstation, and he realizes immediately that she’s recording the whole thing. He freaks out about it, but soon apologizes and cleans up the mess himself. The psychiatrist seems more interested in talking about the mother than the son. Jacob seems completely normal to other people, and she says he’s a great actor. She later goes through the medicine chest to show us his various drugs, and she takes some of his Adderall. Abbey explains that way back, something happened to her baby brother, something that even her own mother doesn’t want to talk about.
The real question here is who the crazy one is, Jacob or his mother…
Commentary
The production value here is top-notch. The film is well-shot, well-acted, and looked really good. Unlike most indie films, the sound here is really good, and it doesn’t drag– until the closet scene late in the film. The pacing is excellent. I’d love to know how they managed to get Ed Asner to be in this, even if he is literally only Skyping in his performance, it’s still him.
On the other hand, the big twist here really was no surprise. I had an inkling while watching the trailer as to what the twist was. I can see someone going in to see this unawares of what kind of film this was and be totally surprised. Still, it’s marketed as a horror film, and anyone who’s into horror is going to be looking for and expecting twists from the beginning. Still, there’s enough doubt about who’s doing what that it stays interesting.