Lair (2021)

Lair has a nasty little hook: it’s a horror film about people being watched, tested, and nudged toward terror by someone who thinks he can “prove” the supernatural like a lab experiment—and that cold, clinical setup makes the dread feel freshly personal. Adam Ethan Crow leans into moody, confident visuals and prowling camerawork that turns ordinary rooms into traps, building an atmosphere thick enough to taste before the violence ever arrives. When it does, it’s brutal and unapologetic, the kind of disemboweling shock that will either thrill you or send you reaching for the remote, but it’s staged with purpose rather than empty splatter. Stick with it and you’ll find the story has a sharp edge up its sleeve, delivering a twisty payoff that rewards viewers who like their horror grim, watchful, and mean.

Lair is aiming for a grim, modern haunted-apartment experiment—part paranormal investigation, part family-in-peril horror—built around the idea of “proving” the supernatural on camera. The problem is it takes a long, dull route to get there, with slow pacing and thin writing that make the early tension feel more like waiting than dread. When it finally tries to wake you up, it leans hard into CGI-heavy mayhem and brutal gore (including disemboweling), which can feel like overcompensation rather than escalation, and the performances occasionally tip into overacting. If you want tight scares, strong character work, and a satisfying payoff, this likely isn’t for you; if you’re tolerant of a sluggish build and you’re mainly here for nasty, late-game carnage and a creepy setup, you may get enough out of it.