It’s not all bad – it really isn’t – but the film, adapted by screenwriters Ben Jacoby and Chase Palmer, is rarely more than a grab-bag of clichés. Try and get through the premise without rolling your eyes: widowed author Tom (Adam Scott) moves with his young son Jake (Acston Luca Porto) into a creaky old house in an all-American suburb.
The lengthy middle section of the film offers hints of character depth and narrative intrigue, which does keep it all quite watchable. But the screenplay suffers from an awkward structure reminiscent of some lazy AI cut-down.
The whittled-down plot is technically about the investigation, but you’ll notice there’s no real connective tissue here; it all feels and sounds like a procedural, but where are the clues, the twists, the interesting shifts in chief suspect? There’s no art to the half-explicable realisations our investigators experience across the movie’s roiling stream of vagueness.
View Green Video on the source websiteThe weirdest of the movie’s crimes, though, is its occasional attempt to imply a different story entirely, touching on the red herring notion that De Niro – twist of twists – might have been the original killer’s accomplice, and is now involved in the copycat crimes. It’s hardly a spoiler to say he isn’t. But it’s interesting to watch the star putter and mumble his way through certain scenes in a way that reads, to anyone well-versed in this kind of crime schlock, as subtly, cleverly shifty; interesting, because you start to wonder if this is a misstep in scripting, direction, editing, or just the maverick misinterpretation of an 83-year-old who hasn’t prepped his scenes.
The actors do bring the requisite presence, while the design of Tom’s empty new home is good and memorable. Peter Deming, the wonderful cinematographer behind classics Mulholland Drive and Evil Dead II as well as Twin Peaks: The Return, works a little magic here, lighting things carefully enough to lift the gloomy digital visuals somewhat above the usual Netflix “what the hell’s happening?” house style.
In the end, nothing here quite works: the crime narrative is unsatisfying, the personal arc undercooked and the light supernatural element irksome, paling next to something like The Black Phone. But the modicum of compelling material is enough to avoid total disaster. If nothing else, there’s a glorious short sequence where De Niro calmly prepares a gnocchi meal, which is worth its weight in gold.
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