"There's Something Wrong With the Children," or how to muddle your film and disappoint your audience

At a certain point the current streaming glut is just going to give way. It has to. There are just so many movies being made and released exclusively for streaming these days, and it simply cannot continue at the pace it’s going; there are going to be diminishing returns at some point if there aren’t already. Vox at the start of this year declared that the “streaming boom” is already “over,” with the great streaming services likely to start pulling back as they hemorrhage cash amid a take-no-prisoners competition for top spot. Well, in any event, this can’t go on indefinitely. That seemingly endless library of fresh content every time you pull up Netflix or Amazon or Hulu, it’s not going to be there forever. One day you’ll look back on these years of abundance the way an aged settler may have looked back on the untouched Willamette Valley, a vanished land of plenty now gone forever to some incomprehensible lacuna.

I think about this when I watch movies like There’s Something Wrong With the Children, a horror movie that huffs and puffs its way through 90 minutes of muddled effort and ultimately fails to blow anything down. This is a movie that tries very hard for about the first forty minutes before lapsing into a torpor that almost exceeds the sum of its torpid parts. It’s as if everyone involved in this film had a dinner date to get to and wanted to wrap things up pronto, chop-chop, cmon-let’s-go. I think the only reason it was made in the first place is because we’re in the era of cheap streaming capital—the age of easy money where even the laziest films can enjoy a sort of high-level bank status they wouldn’t have been afforded even a decade ago. Enjoy this sort of thing while you can, in other words.

Children is one of those modern horror movies that kind of straddles the line between simplistic account and meaningful allegory, and not in a good way. The premise: Two married couples are taking a weekend’s vacation at a couple of cabins in the woods. The one couple has two kids, the other does not. At one point during a hike they stumble across an odd, foreboding brick structure in the woods; within this structure is a deep, unsettling pit; the children appear almost hypnotized by this pit, as if something in it has touched or affected them in some way; shortly thereafter, well…you can see the title of the movie so it’s not hard to guess. They become little monsters and start causing havoc, and that’s that.

It’s not a terrible setup, or it wouldn’t be if the filmmakers were willing to follow certain motifs and emblems to their logical endpoints. Yet the film wants to have it both ways: It is outwardly a sort of bare-bones slasher film, unconcerned with metaphor and interested mostly in who kills who and how, but then it also seems to want to be some sort of parable about—I don’t know, having children? Or maybe mental illness? There’s a guy with mental illness in it, and it seems for a bit like that’s going to be a major plot point, but—nah. It’s not important. It’s not even like there’s this really huge reveal as to whether or not he’s actually having a mental episode; the whole theme just goes nowhere. There’s also lots of talk early in the film about having kids, if you should have kids, what happens when you do have kids; this is ever a relevant discussion in an era where people generally aim to have their first child at 45 years old. You think the filmmakers are maybe going for a sort of commentary on childrearing and what it does to the parental psyche and how it may or may not disrupt one’s dreams and ambitions and lifestyle, but, well…nothing happens there either. The movie seems to sort of forget it ever even raised the question, if it ever really did at all.

This kind of neglect matters. Watching a movie that repeatedly forgets its own point is like having a conversation with someone who is extremely high on cocaine: Every part of the interaction feels very consequential and none of it goes anywhere. This is as disorienting on a practical level as it is disappointing on an artistic one. I mean, look, “Is The Protagonist Actually Under Attack, Or Is He Just Insane?” is pretty well-worn at this point, but at least it’s something, or it’s an attempt at something resembling a narrative element. “Should We Have Kids At All, Or Will They Make Us Miserable and Destroy Our Lives?” is the kind of question that used to strike most reasonable people as insane, but the rare film these days that’s brave enough to even ask it is at least worth watching. Yet when you lose interest in even the pretense of answering these questions, you just sound like a cokehead—all jabber and no substance. I don’t need to tell you that cokeheads are really lame. They talk too fast and they say too little and you just want to be away with them, kind of like I felt in the last 25 minutes of this movie.

The rest of the movie is similarly uninspired. The actors playing the titular children are okay, although there’s so little for them to work with that there’s not a whole lot of chances from them to screw it up. The lead male is Zack Gilford, who had a really fantastic turn as Riley Flynn in last year’s Midnight Mass; he seems to be the only actor in the movie who really knows what he’s doing, even if the film’s really cataclysmic narrative breakdown in its final third really robs him of any powers there. One man can’t be expected to carry the entire burden, especially one so heavy. The filler leadup to the action is never the strongest part of any horror movie, but this one is particularly silly: The mom-and-dad couple are struggling because they engaged in a weird gang-bang in the past and the mom enjoyed herself too much, and this creates some tension, though ultimately they reconcile, but ultimately it simply doesn’t matter. The sum total of this movie is a bunch of stuff that doesn’t matter, including the deaths of seemingly every main character, right up to the smash-cut final scene in which the Final Girl seems to lose her mind in the most bizarre way possible for precisely no discernible reason whatsoever.

And, look, I know I have said this before, but my goodness, on a purely aesthetic level, this film just looks like garbage. It’s just too stupidly perfect. Everyone in it is too well-appointed, their clothes are too sharp and too pressed, their skin is too clean. I can relate to exactly nobody in this movie simply because they look too pretty. I’m not saying I’m ugly or anything, I’m just saying I sort of look like a normal guy, not these strange and ethereal and cartoonishly spotless übermenschlich.

All of which is to say, you know, meh. It’s not like you suffer some sort of existential tragedy watching this movie; it’s short and it takes up little of your time and even less brain space. Yet its really chronic flaws and shortcomings are very sadly common today, and they are emblematic of an era of cinema that is really not worth taking seriously. The streaming phenomenon has created the expectation of an enormous and ever-growing library of constantly fresh “content,” with the viewer under the expectation that he can queue up his favorite service and have all of this sort of laid at his feet. Well, it’s certainly possible—but the end result is just a ton of movies like “There’s Something Wrong With the Children,” films that are obviously rushed, un-thought-out, slapped together by writers who don’t follow out their own renderings and directors who don’t bother to question why they didn’t and actors who presumably just want to get the whole thing done. Well, I get it—everyone’s gotta eat. We all got bills to pay. If you work in streaming, get those bills paid as early as possible, because this whole easy gravy train will not last, and thank goodness.