Movie Review: Shut In

I need to take full responsibility for watching this movie. I’m going to start off right at the Hina test. This movie failed. It failed so miserably I can’t even give it half a point for having Naomi Watts being a pretty together person. As you may recall, the Hina test defines the use of strong female characters and diverse representation. This movie had none of these things. You might say, but Hina, there was a lead woman in the role. Yeah, there was. That was the one, ONE, thing the movie might have done right. And this is barring the absolutely predictable, tired plot.

Let’s go back half a click. This was a horror movie. The mom (Naomi Watts) is sending her troubled step-son (somewhere) and the son and father don’t both make it as the kid (Jonathan from Stranger Things) pulls the car into traffic. He goes into a vegetative state while the mom stays at home, working from a home office as a therapist or something for kids. While seeing one patient, she fights with a social worker to let him stay with her (which is, of course, ridiculous, you can’t just ‘keep’ kids – who did the research on this?). This is when the boy goes missing after showing up randomly at her house and wackiness ensues. When I say wackiness, I mean, it had a few jump scares and then the ending happened and I was like, that was a waste of an hour and a half. 

The story revolves around the son, the white kid who is basically a vegetable for the majority of the movie. Turns out, hold onto your pants, he wasn’t a veggie at all, but was just faking and didn’t want the kid to stay, so has been trying to capture him. The son had also been drugging the mom so she didn’t know which way was up. The mom has a doctor friend who happens to see some movement after she leaves a video chat and rushes off to save her. What the movie amounts to is a bunch of white guys either loving Watts or trying to save her while she flails helplessly through a nonsensical story. The one minority comes in to take her blood for three seconds. This movie was so beyond a waste of time. I’m sorry I wasted time seeing it over Arrival, over Madea at this point.