94 min | PG-13 | August 28, 2020 | 20th Century Studios
Five teenage mutants wake up locked in a hospital that doubles as a cage. Their powers are out of control and something in the building wants them dead. The premise is a horror movie. The result is a franchise placeholder that forgot to be scary.
Dani Moonstar wakes up in a hospital that is not a hospital. It is a locked facility for five teenage mutants whose powers manifested in violence. Dr. Cecilia Reyes runs the place and tells them they are being treated. They are being held. Josh Boone wants to make a haunted-house movie inside the X-Men universe, and the film is really about young people who cannot tell whether the monster chasing them lives in the building or in their own heads.
Blu Hunt plays Dani Moonstar as a blank slate, which works against her because the character is the audience surrogate and never sharpens into a person. Maisie Williams plays Rahne Sinclair with a tenderness that gives the film its only real emotional current. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Illyana Rasputin as a cruel rich girl with a sock puppet dragon and a Russian accent, and she commits to the camp harder than the material deserves. Charlie Heaton mumbles through Sam Guthrie as a guilt-stricken Kentucky boy who flies by accident. Henrique Zaga gets the least to do as Roberto da Costa, a boy who burns when he touches people. The cast is better than the script, which keeps interrupting their scenes to remind everyone this is a franchise property.
Boone and co-writer Knate Gwaltney build the film around the idea that each kid’s worst fear becomes flesh, but the horror never lands because the jump scares are telegraphed and the creatures look like deleted scenes from a different movie. The reshoots are visible in the seams. Performances shift in tone from one cut to the next, and the smiling-men nightmare figures feel grafted on from a studio note rather than imagined by a director. Peter Deming shoots the facility in cold institutional grays that suit the dread, and that restraint is the strongest craft decision in the picture. Then the third act dumps a giant demon bear into the parking lot and the mood evaporates.
The film cannot decide what it is. It is a YA romance, a haunted-house chiller, and a superhero origin story, and it does none of the three with conviction. The young cast suggests a smaller, stranger movie about damaged kids that the corporate machinery would not allow. What reaches the screen is the compromise. It is the sound of a project that spent years in limbo arriving with the life already drained out of it.