With nods to nail-biting predecessors from Alfred Hitchcock to Steven Spielberg, brothers Brett and Drew Pierce, billing themselves collectively as The Pierce Brothers, draw from familiar sources yet manage some genuinely disturbing chills in their second feature.
After an effectively creepy yet unnecessary prologue set three decades earlier, the film settles into the contemporary story of Ben, a teen troubled by his parents' impending divorce who has been sent to spend the summer with his father (Jamison Jones) in a small beach resort community. Ben arrives with a chip on his shoulder and a cast on his arm—shades of L.B. Jefferies from “Rear Window”—the result of his most recent instance of acting out.
This wooded hamlet by the bay—part Amity Island, part Camp Crystal Lake— seems the perfect place to straighten him out. He gets a job at the marina, where his dad works as harbormaster, and quickly befriends Mallory (Piper Curda), a cute, spunky coworker who has a crush on him.
Soon, Ben has developed an interest in the young family renting the house next door, which quickly grows into obsession when their kids go missing and the parents seem oblivious. As it turns out, a shape-shifting witch in the nearby woods is stealing children and inhabiting the bodies of their mothers.
The film benefits from creepily effective special effects and sound design. The shape shifting of the Wretch (the film's term for the creature) is utterly convincing as the new host's body contorts, seemingly from within, accompanied by gruesome cartilaginous cracks and pops. Cinematographer Conor Murphy adds to the sense of dread throughout with eerily still, low-angle camerawork.
Like many of their contemporaries (most notably, The Duffer Brothers with “Stranger Things”), the Pierces don't hide their influences: battery-operated toys suddenly activate as they did in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and Ben's dad gifts him a bike with a conspicuously “E.T.”-style front basket. Even the central conceit of a teen spying on the monster next door is cribbed from Tom Holland's still-effective 1985 horror-comedy “Fright Night.” Yet these shout-outs never overwhelm what is essentially a focused little tale.
That's not to say that everything works. A John Hughes-influenced subplot involving vacationing rich kids mistreating working class Ben goes nowhere, as does a gratuitous seduction and humiliation scene more appropriate for a raunchy ‘80s teen comedy. The labored attempts at last act twists are by turns convoluted and predictable.
Still, Ben's emerging relationship with Mallory is sweet and convincing, and lurking beneath all the nostalgia and body horror are some troubling reflections on motherhood as a force both nurturing and all-consuming.