Synopsis: A woman puts her life on the line to protect her troubled, enigmatic cousin, Winthrop, who has been targeted and hunted by a powerful supernatural force.
Stars: Carla Gugino, Lou Taylor Pucci, Katharine Isabelle, Roman Kinsella, Donald Sales, Jason McKinnon, Jed Rees, Madeleine Kelders, Lee Tichon, Darcey Johnson, Mercedes de la Zerda
Director: Daniel Stamm
Rated: NR
Running Length: 105 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: A cousin she barely knows calls out of the blue, and thirty seconds later, something else has moved in too. Lockbox is cheap, creepy, and smarter than its budget has any right to be, thanks to Carla Gugino.
Lockbox Review: A House, A Cousin, A Warning
“Knifepoint Horror” is a podcast, but calling it that undersells how spare the thing is. Since 2010, a writer working under the name Soren Narnia has been recording horror stories in the first person: one voice, no cast, next to no music or sound design, and titles that run to a single lowercase word. “staircase.” “corpse.” “town.” An ordinary person tells you, plainly and without embellishment, about the worst thing that ever happened to them, and the entire effect comes from how reasonable they sound while they’re doing it.
Narnia has said the biggest influence on him was William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, and specifically a lesson he took from it at ten years old: if you want a horror story to work, tell it like you believe every word of it happened. Hold onto that, because the film’s most divisive choice makes sense the moment you know where it came from.
I had reservations going in, major ones, and I came out the other side surprised by how engaging and, yes, how fun the whole thing is. No classic, but Lockbox shuts you in early and doesn’t hand over the key.
The Voice That Wants You to Believe It
Ellen Hershbergen (Carla Gugino, Gunpowder Milkshake) has just buried her mother, whom she spent years caring for full time after giving up her own career to do it. She’s moved out to a rural town to have something like a life of her own, and her voiceover is explicit about how much she’s enjoying the peace, the space, and the novelty of nobody needing anything from her.
Which is what makes the next thing so obviously a screenplay convenience. A family member calls out of the blue, and inside roughly thirty seconds Ellen is offering a room in her small house to her cousin Winthrop Benson (Lou Taylor Pucci, Evil Dead), an adult man with severe PTSD whom she hasn’t laid eyes on in years. Not a beat of hesitation. Not a flicker of “let me think about it and call you back.” Gugino is more than good enough to have found a fraction of a pause in there, and I’m genuinely surprised nobody asked her for one.
Winthrop is soft-spoken and watchful, carrying trauma that surfaces as sleepwalking and a very short fuse. Their fragile arrangement holds for a while, and then Vahna Minter (Katharine Isabelle) arrives. She’s the sort of neighbor who doesn’t introduce herself so much as materialize, and she comes with a warning: Winthrop is dangerous, she knows it, and she can’t fully explain how. From there the movie stops being a domestic drama. Objects move. Winthrop loses stretches of time he can’t account for. One priest gets involved, then a second with a very different reading of the situation, and Ellen finds herself trying to work out what’s attached to her cousin, how long it’s been there, and what it actually wants from him, all while the town decides he’s the threat.
Director Daniel Stamm, who made The Last Exorcism and Prey for the Devil, escalates with a brio that occasionally tips over into outright mania. I couldn’t get out in front of this thing, and I doubt you will either. It keeps its answers locked up until it’s good and ready to hand them over.
The Cast Understood the Assignment
Gugino is top-notch, and the casting is this film’s insurance policy. She’s been working since Troop Beverly Hills in 1989, and somewhere in the decades since she became the most reliable actor in modern horror without anybody handing her much of anything for it. Her run with Mike Flanagan is a body of work all on its own, from The Haunting of Hill House through Gerald’s Game to The Fall of the House of Usher, where she was unforgettable and, once again, unrewarded. Put lesser actors in these roles and Lockbox is forgotten inside a week. I didn’t love the voiceover she’s handed, a holdover from the podcast’s DNA, but it does serviceable work guiding you through the screenplay’s thinner passages.
Pucci is a fearless actor, not as recognized as Ben Foster, whose approach he carefully models, and this part sends him somewhere I flat-out refuse to describe. Late in the film the role demands a transformation so complete that spelling it out would rob you of one of the movie’s best jolts, so I’ll say only this: he commits all the way down, never winks at the camera, and walks a line that would have collapsed into silliness in lesser hands. He also has to hold the film’s central ambiguity for ninety minutes, and he never tips his hand.
I’ve been in Isabelle’s corner since a 1992 serial killer thriller called Knight Moves, a chilly little mystery that’s hard to track down now and worth the hunt if you find it. That was years before the Ginger Snaps trilogy made her a genre fixture. Her loopy neighbor with a secret blends mystery and quirk nicely, and when the script asks the character to jump three levels at once, she goes without flinching. A deep bench of Canadian character actors fills in around the leads, and every one of them left the maple syrup acting at home.
Built Cheap, Doesn’t Look It
This was made on a modest budget and it doesn’t read like a quickie. Real care went into the atmosphere, and that dedication pays off all the way through. I jumped several times, never off a cheap sting. The frights get built in layers out of Stamm’s staging, Matthew Rogers’ score, and Alfonso Chin’s camera, all of them pulling in the same direction.
Production designer Daren Luc Sasges and art director Grace Alvarez give the house a settled, worn-in quality that sours by degrees as things escalate. Editor Bridget Durnford keeps the tension from leaking during the slower first stretch, which is where the film is most vulnerable. Joel Echallier’s special makeup effects earn their moments in the final act without ever overplaying the hand. This won’t replace a classic haunting picture, but it’s a worthy watch, no question about it.
Where the Box Comes Up Short
Fair is fair, though, and the movie plays its cards a little too close to the vest. What Ellen and Winthrop have to figure out, and how little time they have left to do it, is the spine of the entire back half, and Stamm keeps so much of the mechanism offscreen that the stakes stay fuzzy at precisely the point they should be tightening around your throat. There are rules operating in this story. I never learned enough of them to feel the danger properly, and that’s a real cost.
A subplot involving Winthrop’s arrest sets up serious consequences and then wanders off without them. The handling of PTSD is more careless than cruel, using a veteran’s illness as an on-ramp to the supernatural without much curiosity about the illness itself.
There’s a version of this film that trusts you with its own machinery and honors the man at the center of it, and that version is one of the year’s cleverest horror pictures. This isn’t that version, and it’s still a good time.
Don’t Watch This Before Bed
We’ve been spoiled lately by strong studio releases, and that’s no reason to skip the independents that have been feeding us for years. Obsession was the best horror surprise of the spring. Backrooms and Hokum both delivered. This one sat on my radar and I let the screener wait. My mistake.
Lockbox is a solid genre entry, well acted, with a few frights I didn’t see coming. It’s the one you scroll past, start out of curiosity, and finish two hours later wondering where the night went. Some doors you open because you’re curious. This one opens because something inside has been waiting, patiently, for somebody to lift the lid.
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