Cobweb (2023)

Cobweb is the kind of horror film that earns its chills the old-fashioned way: with patience, atmosphere, and the creeping sense that the safest place in a house might be the one room you can’t trust. Samuel Bodin turns a simple childhood fear into something tactile and dread-soaked, using shadowy cinematography and precise sound design to make every hallway feel like a trap and every silence feel suspicious. Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr are unnervingly effective as parents whose “reassurance” lands like a threat, while the movie’s sly, sickly wit keeps it from feeling like just another jump-scare machine. It’s not for viewers who want clean, comforting answers or who are sensitive to intense child-in-peril tension and bursts of gore, but if you like your horror moody, nasty, and confidently off-kilter, this one sinks in and stays there.

Cobweb is clearly aiming for that slow-burn “is the kid imagining it, or is the house lying to him?” kind of horror, with a creepy setup and a nasty, claustrophobic Halloween vibe. The problem is the script doesn’t give the characters much depth, so the parents feel more like plot devices than people, and the mystery starts to wobble once it has to cash the checks it’s been writing. When the third act arrives, it leans into louder, gorier chaos but the answers and ending can feel either too vague or oddly unsatisfying, like the film swaps tension for noise instead of delivering a clean payoff. If you like atmospheric menace, a strong central child performance, and can tolerate a messy finish, you’ll get some chills; if you need tight logic, rich characterization, and a landing that sticks, this may waste your time.