After losing her son to cancer, a grieving mother befriends another boy to replace her dead son, but her plans unravel when a retired detective starts searching for the missing child, and she begins to suspect there is something supernatural living in the basement.
Grimmfest says: Combining cat-and-mouse criminal investigation, morally complex psychological thriller, and a chilling exploration of creative process as psychotic compulsion, this nightmarish fable takes the notion of “Fairy Tale Thinking” to its darkest, most devastating place. Alyssa Sutherland is astonishing as the bereaved bestselling author, processing her own grief and trauma through a series of redemptive allegorical fables, who kidnaps a young boy who reminds her of her dead son. The film establishes her character, draws us into her life, in such a way that we never lose total sympathy or understanding for her, even as the narrative grows ever darker and more disturbing; continually confounding and challenging expectations; taking the core situation of MISERY and flipping it, to brilliant and disturbing effect: the writer is here the abductor, her victim, as we will gradually realise, is her muse. Even more devastating is the way the film subverts the somewhat overused idea of writers using fairy tales to confront their own abusive pasts, by asking what happens when the coping mechanism starts to dominate; to determine and direct action? What happens when it turns poisonous and pathological? There are visual echoes of David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD and Jennifer Kent’s THE BABADOOK, as the sinister fairytale world bleeds out into reality, but the film grounds its more surreal, dreamlike scenes, contrasting them with the ongoing police investigation and the increasingly troubling relationship between the author protagonist and the kidnapped boy. Sibling child actors Alastair and Gilbert Bradman are both remarkable as her late son and the boy whose resemblance drives her to abduction, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers provides an interesting foil as the increasingly obsessed investigating detective. The end result is a truly chilling, unflinching, yet surprisingly sympathetic study of escalating psychosis and creative monomania; gripping, thought provoking, and emotionally brutal, leading to a grim, downbeat, bleakly inevitable ending, which is both horrifying and heartbreaking.