97 min | PG-13 | October 30, 2020 | Focus Features
Oliver is a nonverbal boy with no friends and a monster that lives inside his screens. The creature is lonely too, and the glass is the door it comes through. The scary part is not the monster. It is the device every kid already holds.
Oliver is a nonverbal autistic boy who communicates through a phone app and a tablet. He has no friends his own age. A children’s story called Misunderstood Monsters appears on his devices without explanation. The story is about Larry, a lonely creature who wants a friend and uses screens to cross into the real world. Come Play is a horror film about loneliness on both sides of the glass. The monster and the boy want the same thing.
Azhy Robertson plays Oliver without dialogue and carries the film through expression and gesture. He makes the boy’s isolation legible without tipping into sentimentality. Gillian Jacobs plays Sarah, the mother, as a woman fraying under the weight of a marriage and a child she cannot reach. She lets exhaustion and guilt sit on her face in equal measure. John Gallagher Jr. plays Marty, the father, who works nights and retreats from the family’s strain. The two parents fight like people who love each other and have run out of patience.
Jacob Chase writes and directs his first feature from his own short film. His best idea is visual. Larry is invisible to the naked eye and appears only through a screen, so the characters raise phones and tablets to see the thing standing in front of them. The camera turns a device into a flashlight that reveals what the eye cannot see. Chase stages several sequences around this single rule and it pays off. The sound design leans on the hum and chime of electronics to mark the monster’s approach.
The film works best when it trusts the metaphor. A lonely child and a lonely monster reach for each other, and the screen is the thing that connects them and consumes them both. Come Play loses some of that power when it falls back on standard jump scares and a loud final act. The quiet scenes say more than the loud ones. Chase has a real idea about screens and isolation and he mostly honors it. The result is a horror film with a working heart underneath the mechanics.