107 min | R | April 30, 2021 | Open Road Films
A failed comic book artist loses his wife and inherits a custody fight with her rich father. Then his ghoulish puppet creations start crawling around the house where his daughter sleeps. The puppets are scarier than the script, which is not a compliment.
Separation wants to be a haunted-house horror film and a custody drama at the same time. Jeff is a failed comic book artist whose marriage has collapsed. His wife Samantha dies in a sudden accident, and her wealthy father moves to take custody of their daughter Jenny. Strange figures begin appearing in the house, drawn from Jeff’s macabre comic creations. The film treats the supernatural as a metaphor for grief and a broken family. It never decides whether it believes in the ghosts or the metaphor.
Rupert Friend plays Jeff as a passive man who lets the plot happen to him. He sketches, he mopes, he reacts, and he never generates the dread the film needs from its lead. Brian Cox plays Rivers, the rich grandfather, with a contempt he can summon in his sleep, and the film gives him nothing harder to do. Madeline Brewer plays Samantha in flashbacks that exist mostly to establish how unhappy the marriage is. Violet McGraw plays Jenny as a watchful child, and she is the only person on screen who behaves like the situation frightens her. Mamie Gummer appears as Maggie and disappears before the part registers.
William Brent Bell directs from a script by Josh Braun and Nick Amadeus, and the seams between the horror and the divorce procedural never close. The one genuine asset is Troy James, a contortionist who plays the creature Nerezza with limbs that bend the wrong way and a crawl no digital effect could match. Bell shoots these moments in low light and lets the practical body do the work, and they are the only scenes with any pulse. The rest of the production design leans on the comic book panels, which the film projects across walls and reflections without ever making them frightening. The editing strands these flourishes between long stretches of legal exposition and custody arguments. The score swells on cue to tell you when to feel afraid, because the images will not.
The problem is structural. A custody battle and a ghost story can share a film, but each needs the other to mean something, and here they sit side by side without connecting. Jeff’s dead-end career and his contempt for Rivers carry no supernatural weight, and the creatures carry no emotional one. The film mistakes a sad man in a big house for tension and a contortionist for a third act. Underneath the puppets and the shadows there is a story about a father and a daughter, and the movie buries it.