Shut In: Cliched And Full Of Plot Holes

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Doors bang, winds howl and plot-holes glare, as Naomi Watts mopes her way through yet another low-rent psychological thriller.

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What can you say about Shut In? It’s a film so clichéd that its plot can be mapped with almost perfect accuracy onto its mercifully short running time.

At 15 minutes in we’ve met Mary, a recently-widowed child psychologist, whose mental state deteriorates after she is forced to provide 24-hour care for her vegetative stepson Steven.

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Rebellious teen turned comatose creep, Steven is played with scenery-chewing malevolence by Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton, who is arguably the best thing in the movie and appears to be making a successful career toeing the line between sensitive and sinister.

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At 30 minutes in, one of Mary’s patients – a little deaf kid played by Jacob Tremblay -disappears. Right around this time, a creepy, Chucky-like apparition starts haunting Mary’s dreams.

Is it a coincidence? Or is something more sinister afoot? In a film as formulaic as this one, the question is almost rhetorical.

At the hour mark, the film’s well-signposted twist lumbers into view, signalling a gory final showdown, followed by an incongruously happy ending. And that is more or less that…

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It wouldn’t be fair to say that Shut In didn’t stick with me. It certainly left me wanting to know more.

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Why, for instance, does the film include a sequence in which a character drinks shampoo and then noisily vomits into the toilet?

Why does Hollywood still think that even faintly adorable children wearing parkas and baby converse are scary?

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And why does Mary call the police after a terrifying encounter with a raccoon, only to be visibly relieved to find a child that doesn’t belong to her sleeping in her car?

These moments of wonder aside, the film is all surface, shot with the bland, lifeless veneer of a John Lewis advert: even the billowing snow in its chilly New England setting looks computer-generated.

Shut In is best summed up by Oliver Platt’s cameo appearance as Mary’s psychiatrist Dr Wilson, who councils her almost exclusively through a series of Skype appointments.

In a performance that is quite literally phoned in, Platt seems to want to appear in Shut In about as much as I wanted to watch it.

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