★★

There’s said to be a fine line between horror and comedy. Certainly, these must be the hardest of art’s genres to master. It’s a high bar to leap when a viewer’s enjoyment is determined by the manifestation of a tangibly physical response to what they are watching. You’ll get no such twinge in a viewing of Cobweb, the first horror to spawn from the comically-oriented Point Grey Pictures. As producers, Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg may be well versed in the elicitation of laughter but screams? Not so much apparently. Rogan and Goldberg have a dozen horrid comedies in their filmography and can now add a laughable horror to the roster. It would seem it really is a fine line.

Chief among Cobweb’s flaws is the overarching sense that the film is simply trying far too hard. A script by Chris Thomas Devlin – writer of 2022’s risible Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot – sets its story ‘one week before Halloween’. There’s a random and oddly pointless pumpkin patch in our protagonist’s backyard, while he bathes in a bathroom that makes Room 237’s tub look homely. Characters speak in stilted oddities, spouting lines no real human has ever spoken. Pronouncements like: ‘you have a great, big, and beautiful imagination’ and ‘it was a very traumatic event’. While the intent is to raise the alarm that something is very wrong in the old, creaky, cobwebbed, dusty, detached ‘home’ of our pint sized hero, the effect is to cheapen the performances and lose fine actors in the hokum.

At the centre of the web is rising star Woody Norman, the teen who held his own against Joaquin Phoenix in Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon two years back. Norman plays ethereal eight-year-old Peter. He’s the only child of Lizzy Caplan’s seventies styled Carol and her authoritarian other half Mark, who is played by The Boys’ Anthony Starr, with much of the same demented ferocity as emits his Homelander. Cleopatra Coleman is, meanwhile, gifted the thankless role of Peter’s kindly and earnestly concerned teacher Miss Divine. She’s essentially Miss Honey from Matilda, with the blatant relation enough to make one wonder if Cobweb is meant to be a knowing and humorous pastiche, rather than cliché ridden copy-spider. If that is the case, the merit is entirely lost.

When little Peter, all dark eyes and black curls, starts hearing a knock from the inside of his bedroom wall, Mark and Carol are quick on the dismissal. It is, they insist, just a nightmare and nightmares are not allowed. Next night, the knock speaks. What’s more, it tells Peter that he cannot trust his parents, that they are murderers and that he is not safe. She – for it is a she – has a point. Following his expulsion from school, for lamping a bully down a flight of stone steps, Peter is locked away by mum and dad in the basement, which is concealed somewhat unnecessarily behind the kitchen fridge. That’s not all they’re hiding either. It won’t take long for the astute to work out exactly what’s going on here but a building hope that the film may yet wrong foot does at least allow for a degree of momentum, even when it does not.

There is, at least, flare in the framing of debutant director Samuel Bodin, whose competent camera very occasionally lands on visual brilliance. Originality is, yet, fleeting. For the most part, Cobweb’s offerings are painfully derivative. When the true evil of the film finally reveals itself, she’s little more than a carbon copy of Ringu’s Sadako, with a dash of Exorcist spider walking thrown in. A poor narrative structure forces the pitiful being to explain its own woebegone back story, while the reveal that a Cheshire Cat grin lies behind the Rapunzel locks makes for the visual definition of having one’s cake and eating it. What’s more, all is doused in ladles of soupy and overdone scoring from electro trip-hob composer Drum & Lace. It’s maudlin and dislocating stuff.

Put simply, when you’re forced to inject a meaningless and ineffective nightmare sequence slam bang in the middle of your ninety-minuter in fear of losing your audience, you know you’ve lost the plot. It raises a chuckle at least.

T.S.