Something wretched about this season, I guess. Shut In is the second film in the last week — after Gautham Menon’s Achcham Yenbadhu Madamaiyada — to start off rather promisingly before tapering off into irredeemable insignificance. In the beginning, Farren Blackburn’s film suggests an introspective take on familial relationships through the prism of horror. In hindsight, I realise the folly, but for a while, it was all reminiscent of Babadook (2014) — that film too is about a single, lonely mother, with a helpless son, trying to make sense of the supernatural occurrences in her dreary house. However, now that I have seen Shut In , I hope that Jennifer Kent, the director of Babadook , will find it in her heart to forgive me for the comparison.
Bad horror films usually come with an excessive reliance on jump scares; Shut In too has its fair share. In fact, it has more than its fair share. The first jump scare involving a raccoon is terrific, and got the whole theatre hall laughing in unease. It wasn’t yet evident that the film would then plummet in a steady decline. Making matters worse are cheap scenes which show you a horrific event and then the character waking up from a nightmare. These keep piling on relentlessly, and eat into a bulk of the running time of 91 minutes.
Ultimately, Shut In is simply a B-grade thriller that’s ashamed to be one. That’s perhaps why the protagonist, Mary Portman (Naomi Watts), isn’t just an average helpless woman. She’s also a child psychologist. It’s another matter that her medical skills never come to the fore or affect the story in any manner. You have to wonder how good a psychologist she is, when she confuses basic symptoms of a psychoactive drug — the like of which she surely studied extensively about — with the presence of a ghost. Somehow , the makers seem to have convinced — no, conned — Naomi Watts into featuring in this one. It’s her presence that stands between you and the exit door.
Perhaps Shut In should just have been content to be a regular story of a mother and her son getting into trouble while in their lonely bungalow, but then, that’d become something like a Panic Room . The big twist of the film that comes out of nowhere almost made me burst into laughter. There is no build-up, no effort at developing flesh around the twist to make it believable when it comes. The film touches a sensational low when the villain, his face contorted in utterly unconvincing menace, walks the house, dragging his axe against the wall, as though channelling his inner Jack Torrance ( The Shining ). It’s then that it truly hit me what a fool I was to ever take this film seriously. If it weren’t for Naomi Watts…
Shut In
Director: Farren Blackburn
Starring: Naomi Watts, Oliver Platt
Runtime: 91 mins