88 min | R | July 21, 2023 | Lionsgate
A boy hears a voice from inside the walls of his house. His parents tell him it is nothing and forbid him from leaving. The walls are right and the parents are lying.
Peter is a quiet, bullied eight-year-old who lives with two parents who watch him too closely. A tapping noise comes from behind his bedroom wall. A voice answers his questions. It claims to be a girl his parents locked away, and it tells him his mother and father are the threat. Samuel Bodin builds the film around the gap between what a frightened child believes and what the adults insist is real. The horror lives in the suspicion that the people who feed you and tuck you in are the monsters.
Lizzy Caplan plays Carol with a smile that never reaches comfort. She delivers maternal lines in a flat register that turns reassurance into warning. Antony Starr plays Mark with rigid control and sudden flares of menace under the surface. He carves a Halloween pumpkin like a man rehearsing something worse. Woody Norman plays Peter as a watchful, shrinking boy who reads every adult face for danger. Cleopatra Coleman plays Miss Devine, the substitute teacher whose kindness makes her the one person Peter might trust, which marks her as a target.
Bodin directs from a script by Chris Thomas Devlin that treats the family house as a trap with rules. The production design leans on amber lamplight and deep shadow so that doorways and stairwells swallow the edges of every frame. The camera holds on closed doors and the seam where wall meets floor, training the eye to fear the architecture itself. Devlin structures the first hour as accumulating dread, each small cruelty from the parents tightening the screw. The slow burn works because the film commits to Peter’s limited point of view and lets the audience doubt him.
The film earns its tension and then spends most of it. The third act trades patient suggestion for a literal reveal that explains the mystery and drains its menace. What was suggestive becomes mechanical, and the parents who frightened most when half-glimpsed lose power once the film shows its full hand. Bodin stages the climax with energy, and Caplan and Starr keep committing even as the script abandons restraint. The setup promises a fairy tale about the lies adults tell children. The ending settles for a haunted house.