Parents fight to save their son when a mysterious creature uses his electronic devices to break into our world.
Spoilers Ahead!
“Come Play” possess an intriguing enough premise: A young autistic boy, Oliver (Azhy Robertson), feels cut off from the rest of the world, including his own parents, Sarah and Marty (Gillian Jacobs and John Gallagher Jr.) so he finds refuge in his cell phone and tablet. When a mysterious app that includes a story called “Misunderstood Monsters” shows up on his tablet, and talks about a lonely creature called Larry who wants to make new friends, Oliver begins to experience strange goings-on around the house and is convinced Larry is trying to cross over into his world from the other side. Unable to speak, he conveys his thoughts and needs to his parents using a communication app on his cell phone but when he fails to properly clarify to them what is happening, they think he is utilizing his overactive imagination but soon thereafter, they too begin experiencing supernatural anomalies and quickly come to realize that it is not Oliver’s imagination they need to be afraid of.
Cinematographer Maxime Alexandre (“Crawl,” “The Nun,” “Annabelle: Creation”) creates a beautiful-looking palette, harkening back to early Spielberg and infusing scenes with unabated dread and apprehension, typically reserved for skilled horror filmmakers such as James Wan, Fede Alvarez, and Ari Aster, to name but a few. Director Jacob Chase, in his second feature film outing, does a credible job overall, but in the end, while “Come Play” starts out as a supernatural horror, similar to “Poltergeist,” it winds up more comparable to “E.T.,” at least tonally. When Larry appears early on, he is kept in the shadows, as any good movie monster should be, and instills fear into those around him, but towards the end, we come to understand that he really is a misunderstood creature who genuinely wants a pal. Thus, the scare factor dissipates when we see Larry reach out his elongated, fragile hand, and we actually feel sorry for him.
The sudden change from horror to children’s fantasy, almost completely negates everything witnessed early on and throughout the movie, we witness Oliver’s mother, Sarah, constantly trying to reach out and connect with him but him being autistic, means he doesn’t know how to respond to her the way she wants him to. During the finale, Sarah sacrifices her life for Oliver and ends up joining Larry on the other side, and in the final scene, we see Oliver dancing with the invisible ghost of his mother. This ending felt like it was tacked on at the last minute and was totally contradictory to the events that came before it. Oliver was seemingly incapable of reaching out to his mother while she was alive but now that she’s dead, he has no problem doing so. Thankfully, director Jacob Chase didn’t reduce his film to an overabundance of cheap scares and thrills like so many other titles in the genre, instead, relying on genuine fear and anticipation to move the story along. “Come Play” isn’t a bad movie, it just feels like it’s confusing, not knowing whether it’s a conventional horror film or a children’s fantasy. You decide!
In Select Theaters Friday, October 30th
