Pity Peter (Woody Norman), the young poppet caught in the middle of Cobweb. He is being bullied at school and banned from trick-or-treating by his creepy parents (Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr), who are given to cryptic announcements (“Not everything is as sweet as it seems”) when they aren’t locking him in the cellar. Digging in his garden, he finds a skull just below the soil. As if that weren’t bad enough, the pumpkin crop is showing signs of blight. No one could blame the lad for looking forward to consoling chats with the female voice coming from within his bedroom wall, urging him to fight back against his tormentors like the boy in Let the Right One In.
On the plus side, Peter has a kindly teacher (Cleopatra Coleman) who clearly models herself on Miss Honey from Matilda, and shows up on his doorstep after the boy draws a self-portrait captioned: “Help Me”. There is also a home invasion by masked intruders, while the arachnid-related threat promised by the title materialises in the shape of a creature to which the old saying “It’s more afraid of you than you are of it” manifestly does not apply.
Capably if unvaryingly directed by French first-timer Samuel Bodin, and co-produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Point Grey Pictures, Cobweb is almost perfectly named. Cobwebbed would be more accurate, perhaps: every detail is secondhand, if not downright hoary, from a spider-walking ghoul (The Exorcist) whose face is obscured by a Rapunzel-length fringe (The Ring) to scuttling, speeded-up fiends (The Babadook), buried family secrets (The Pact) and an incongruously jaunty song over the end credits (An American Werewolf in London).
Plucky young Norman, last seen opposite Joaquin Phoenix in C’mon C’mon, holds his own impressively, but a less harried and haunted-looking kid it would be hard to find. No one involved with the film seems to have noticed that the revelation of the monster’s identity not only demands that the creature itself must narrate its own lamentable backstory but that a certain amount of victim-blaming is involved. To say more would be to reveal spoilers to the handful of viewers who don’t guess the outcome after the film’s first 10 minutes.
• Cobweb is in UK cinemas from 1 September.
