The Verdict
This is your second feature, McCarthy, and you walked straight past the sophomore slump that swallows most directors. After Caveat you doubled down on the dread instead of the budget, and the restraint is the whole point.
The hook is gloriously unhinged: a blind psychic medium uses a life-sized wooden man to figure out who murdered her twin sister. On paper that is a creepypasta dare. On screen you made it land, which is the harder magic trick.
SXSW 2024 crowned this one of the year's scariest, and a 96 percent critics score backs them up. You earned the word-of-mouth the slow way: by actually being frightening, not by being loud.
What it nails
- ▲A premise so strange it should not work, executed with enough conviction that it absolutely does.
- ▲Carolyn Bracken pulling double duty as both twin sisters and giving each one a distinct pulse.
- ▲The wooden man as a horror object: static, life-sized, and worse the longer the camera lingers.
- ▲Word-of-mouth scares built on tension and reveal rather than jump-scare volume.
What it botches
- ▼Leaning on a blind-psychic-medium device that asks the audience to buy a lot of supernatural rules at once.
- ▼A murder-mystery engine that occasionally has to stop the dread to deliver exposition.
- ▼A second-feature scale that keeps the world small when a few set-pieces beg to breathe.
- ▼Riding so hard on one central gimmick that the rest of the cast becomes furniture around it.
Who it's for
Slow-burn horror sickos who want to be unsettled, not bludgeoned, and anyone who heard the SXSW buzz and wants to know what the screaming was about.
Who should skip
Viewers who need wall-to-wall action and find a single creepy object sitting in a room a waste of a Friday night.
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