Director – Samuel Bodin, Screenplay – Chris Thomas Devlin, Producers – Andrew Childs, Josh Fagen, Evan Goldberg, Roy Lee, Seth Rogen & James Weaver, Photography – Philip Lozano, Music – Drum & Lace, Visual Effects – Rodeo VFX (Supervisor – Nancy Heller) & VFX Legion, Special Effects Supervisor – Ivo Jivkov, Production Design – Alan Gilmore. Production Company – Point Grey Pictures, Ltd./Vertigo Entertainment.
Cast
Woody Norman (Peter), Anthon Starr (Mark), Lizzy Caplan (Carol), Cleopatra Coleman (Miss Devine), Luke Busey (Brian), Jay Rincon (Principal)
Plot
In the town of Holdenfield, eight year old Peter is bullied at school. At home, Peter begins to hear noises in the walls of the house. His parents insist that it is just rats. A voice then begins to talk to Peter, saying to trust it and encouraging him to stand up for himself. Peter begins to realise his parents are keeping secrets in the house. Peter’s substitute teacher Miss Devine begins to take an interest in his home life whereupon Peter’s parents abruptly take him out of school.
Cobweb was a surprise sleeper, despite being released with little publicity where it gained reasonable word of mouth. It was the first feature film for French director Samuel Bodin. Bodin had gained some acclaim for his fan film Batman: Ashes to Ashes (2009) and more recently made the undeniably creepy French tv mini-series Marianne (2019). The surprise is that it comes with the backing of Seth Rogen and his co-writing/directing/producing partner Evan Goldberg and their Point Grey production company, along with the Vertigo Entertainment production company of Roy Lee who was behind the spate of English-language remakes of Asian horror films during the 2000s and most recently the remake of It (2017).
Cobweb quickly charts out a disturbing territory, even if you can’t always put a finger on what is going on. Visually the film has a brooding, off-key look to it. There’s the old decaying family home and the setting of Halloween – even a front yard of rotting pumpkins, which may have a body buried beneath. The inside of the house is expanses of dull grey patterned wallpaper and hallways that seem too close together, or kitchens and living rooms in desaturated grey that looks almost as though the whole house has faded away into something dust-covered and forgotten.
The casting is slightly to one side too – there’s the top-billed Lizzy Caplan giving one of her weirdest performances, a side of her we haven’t seen before. Not to mention Anthony Starr, no less than Homelander in tv’s The Boys (2019- ), which is also produced by Rogen and Goldberg, trying to play a normal, regular father before disturbing undercurrents start to emerge. Gary Busey’s thirteen year-old son Luke turns up as a school bully. The most normal of the faces is Cleopatra Coleman, an actress with a great deal of natural energy who has been bubbling away in roles, who hovers on the sidelines with concern.
Peter (Woody Norman) listens to the voices in the walls
Samuel Bodin produces a number of outlandish jumps – the abrupt appearance of an eye at the hole in the wall; the dream where Woody Norman wakes in the night and sees shapes crossing in the foreground in the dark, his father standing in the corner and is then abruptly attacked by a seemingly possessed Lizzy Caplan; or the climactic scenes with him trapped in the cellar and long elongated figures stretching their arms down to reach him. Particularly creative is the use of some of exaggerated shadow effects to achieve something almost expressionistic. And then of course comes the last third of the film with the emergence of what is in the cellar, scuttling through the dark and snatching people.
[PLOT SPOILERS] The deformed thing in the cellar/attic has been a longstanding trope in genre cinema in films like The Shuttered Room (1967), The Beast in the Cellar (1970) and The Unseen (1981) to the recent likes of No One Gets Out Alive (2021) and Barbarian (2022). That said, none of these play into the sheer creepiness factor here – of figures with giant elongated arms, turned into insectoid creatures and Bodin’s use of expressionistic effect.
Cobweb should not be confused with the South Korean film Cobweb (2023) that also came out the same year.
