Released 2021. Watched February 22th, 2026.
I was ready to hate this movie. I heard of it through an advertisement on Screambox TV's on-demand channel thing, which my friend sometimes has playing in the background when I hang out with them. The reviews in the trailer made it sound up my alley, but the last movie I watched because of a Screambox ad pissed me off so bad, so. When I looked up this movie, I saw I could stream it on Tubi...orange flag...and it had bad, though not horrible reviews. My expectations were low going in.
There is plenty to dislike here. A lot of the dialogue is clunky, the score is unbearable dramatic, and the child actors are mediocre at best, which is rough in a movie where they make up three-fifths of the cast. At first we're supposed to believe that the children don't want Holly, their new step-mother, there, but later we learn that actually it's their father Richard who they don't want there. I like this choice narritively, but in hindsight, many of the actions they took no longer make sense. I appreciate the restraint shown in not making explicit why the children's mother, Nina, died. It's implied in one line of dialogue that she may have had an accident, but in another it's suggested that the children drove her crazy. This ambiguity appeals to me. I also appreciate the choice not to show her dead body, which was likely made for budgetary reasons, but still adds more mystique to the situation, since we can't deduce how long she might have been dead from her corpse's appearence.
What at first appears to be a run-of-the-mill horror flick about creepy kids who don't want a new mom reveals itself to be instead about creepy kids who don't want to be taken away by social services or be abused by their capricious, alcoholic father who invited himself back into their lives. I find this much more compelling and refreshing enough to forgive some, though not all, of the movie's shortcomings. And, let it be said, there were some moments that evoked real, physically-felt emotional reactions in me. Not even some good movies can say that.
All that said...I hated the way the very last shot was edited. Not a great note to end on.