I’ve been a huge fan of Naomi Watts for a long, long time. Plus, Shut In has a protagonist you really care about and who has an interesting journey, so for me it was a no-brainer. “I’m a big fan of those pared-down ’70s American movies that had a European aesthetic.
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“When I first read Shut In, I was excited by the fact that it was a genre movie that could be very beautiful and shot with great artistry,” Blackburn says. Shut In is a heart-pounding thriller starring Naomi Watts as a widowed child psychologist who lives an isolated existence in rural New England. When a young boy Mary (Watts) is treating goes missing, and is presumed dead, she becomes convinced that his ghost is haunting her and her bedridden son. The film stars Naomi Watts, Oliver Platt, Charlie Heaton, Jacob Tremblay, and David Cubitt. Shut In is a thriller directed by Farren Blackburn from a Blacklisted script written by Christina Hodson. It was shot in various Canadian locations including Vancouver and Montreal. (Yes, it all makes sense in context, I suppose, but still. She offers it her all, to be sure, but is incapable of overcoming the inanities of a screenplay so beneath her that there are times when it seems to be going out of her way to embarrass her-in one especially mortifying moment, we get to see one of the best actresses around kneeling in front of a toilet naked while chugging baby shampoo in order to help her induce vomiting. She has been in a lot of movies, some very good, some very bad but few which have given her as little to work with as this one does. Which brings us back to the inexplicable presence of Naomi Watts, an actress I have admired ever since I saw her for the first time as the spunky sidekick in the long-forgotten “ Tank Girl” and whose work in “ Mulholland Drive” is one of the best screen performances that I've ever seen. Believe me, in this case, that gets really tiresome after a while.
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To make matters worse, director Farren Blackburn (a veteran of such TV shows as “Doctor Who” and “ Daredevil”) directs everything at such a poky tempo that it feels twice as long as its 90-minute running time and proves incapable of delivering a scare that doesn’t rely solely on people suddenly popping up out of nowhere. (Suffice it to say, it almost makes the big twist in “ The Boy” seem staid and logical by comparison.) Second, the story leading up to that less-than-spectacular reveal is a heavy-handed drag that spends more time blatantly ripping off elements from Stanley Kubrick’s take on “ The Shining” than in trying to create a compelling story of its own. First, the big twist is so ridiculous that viewers will more likely find themselves laughing at its sheer silliness than reeling from its dramatic rug-pulling. There are two key problems with that approach.
Watching the story unfold, you get the sense that first-time screenwriter Christina Hodson came up with the big final twist first and then decided to work backwards to construct a narrative that would fit it. The concept of “Shut In” is promising, I suppose, but the execution here is pretty much a total botch from start to finish.
Good thing that a raging ice storm is bearing down on where she lives because absolutely nothing strange or bizarre would possibly happen when she was cut off from the outside world, right? While her psychiatrist friend suggests that she is suffering from the effects of parasomnia as the result of what has happened with both Stephen and Tom, she is convinced that something else entirely is going on. A search for Tom goes on in earnest, and Mary is crushed with guilt over what has happened until strange things begin happening around the house. Before she can do much of anything, he just as quickly takes off into the frigid evening again and cannot be found. One night, one of her more troubled patients, a young deaf boy named Tom ( Jacob Tremblay from “ Room”) turns up on her doorstep. Her Skype sessions with another shrink ( Oliver Platt) are not helping.
Six months later, Mary is caring for Stephen at home by herself, and, while she loves him, the pressure is clearly getting to her. As the story opens, a horrible car crash has killed her husband and left 18-year-old stepson Stephen ( Charlie Heaton of “Stranger Things”) paralyzed from the neck down and unable to communicate. Watts plays Mary Portman, a child psychologist who lives and works in a remote corner of rural Maine.
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