94 min | R | May 13, 2022 | Universal Pictures
Andy can push thoughts into your head. His daughter Charlie can burn down a building by looking at it. A government agency wants the girl, and the movie wants to be over.
Andy and Charlie McGee run from a shadowy government agency that wants the girl’s power. Andy can push thoughts into people’s heads. Charlie sets fires with her mind. The agency that experimented on her parents now wants to weaponize the child. The film treats this premise as homework rather than horror, marching from one beat to the next with the energy of a contractual obligation.
Zac Efron plays Andy as a tired man with a nosebleed problem and little else. His mind-control power costs him blood and brain cells, and Efron registers the toll without ever making the desperation feel real. Ryan Kiera Armstrong plays Charlie with a flat affect that the film mistakes for menace. She lights things on fire and stares, and the staring carries no interior weight. Michael Greyeyes plays the assassin John Rainbird as a man stalking a child, and the script gives him a half-formed mysticism it never develops. Kurtwood Smith and Gloria Reuben appear as agency figures and recite exposition.
Keith Thomas directs from a script by Scott Teems, and the staging drains every set piece of tension. Fire should be the film’s whole reason to exist. Instead the conflagrations look small and cheap, lit like a stage play and edited to hide rather than reveal. John Carpenter, his son Cody, and Daniel Davies supply a synth score with nothing underneath it to push against. The music throbs over scenes that refuse to build, so the menace it promises never arrives on screen.
The film adapts a Stephen King novel about a child too powerful to control and forgets to make the power frightening or the child human. Every conflict resolves on schedule. The agency is generically evil. The father is generically doomed. Nothing accumulates, because the movie treats its own premise as a box to check rather than a story to tell.