Directors: David Charbonier, Justin Powell
Writers: David Charbonier, Justin Powell
Stars: Lonnie Chavis, Ezra Dewey, Kristin Bauer van Straten, Micah Hauptman, Scott Michael Foster
Synopsis: After Bobby and his best friend Kevin are kidnapped and taken to a strange house in the middle of nowhere, Bobby manages to escape. But as he starts to make a break for it, he hears Kevin’s screams for help and realizes he can’t leave his friend behind.
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There’s a lot of promise early on the new Shudder Original thriller The Boy Behind the Door, written and directed by David Charbonier and Justin Powell. The opening shots set a strong and ominous mood, and the first scene with two twelve-year-old best friends Bobby (Lonnie Chavis) and Kevin (Ezra Dewey) is a good one—they take a slow walk through the woods and talk about their dream of fleeing their small town and going to California. The abduction of the two kids that follows a moment later is terrifying, and there’s a sense that Bobby and Kevin are going to be put through the wringer by the time this narrative reaches its climax.
But despite a few satisfactory shocks throughout and a menacing final twenty minutes, The Boy Behind the Door is a mixed bag of tricks we’ve all seen before in better movies and ultimately feels like a terrific twenty-minute short film stretched way too long to a feature-length ninety minutes.
What makes this child abduction film a little different than some others is that both boys aren’t immediately locked up and have to spend the rest of the movie trying to find a way to escape. Kevin is removed from the trunk of a car and yanked inside a middle-of-nowhere farmhouse while Bobby is kept in the trunk, where he struggles to breathe. When he finds a way out, he runs for his life—only stopping when he hears the loud cries of his friend from the house, and he heads back to save him. At this point Kevin becomes a supporting role in the film, only seen or heard occasionally while we spend most of the time with Bobby as he does everything he can to find his friend and protect his own life in the process.
These earlier scenes also work fine of Bobby making the courageous choice to locate Kevin, with Charbonier and Powell employing an effective editing technique of cutting to that California beach the two young boys talked about exploring one day, Bobby now unsure if they’ll ever be able to touch their toes in that warm water. The house he walks through is dark and unpleasant, and there’s a chance of him bumping into a madman around every corner. There’s an eerie silence in this early part of the film I enjoyed, very little dialogue or music playing, the camera staying on Bobby as works his way through this maze of a home.
When the kidnapper appears, the tension amps up big time, but then what happens next is too easy and unlikely, and a lot of the suspense drains from the movie especially for the next half-hour, not enough of a threat in the second act to keep us scared or invested in the story. I’m all for thrillers that move slowly, but The Boy Behind the Door comes to a crawl in many scenes while at the same time not giving us enough complications in the plot or a significant raising of the stakes. Bobby knows where Kevin is. He struggles to get him out. And with seemingly no more kidnapper nearby to put either kid in jeopardy, there’s little happening to keep us engaged.
Another problem is the overall look of the movie, which eventually devolves into a constant too-dark sameness, nothing creative or imaginative being done with the cinematography or editing. I love those great early flashes to the California beach that show the sad loss of a dream, but after that there’s little of interest on a technical level, especially when we stay in the house for most of the running time with endless shots of Bobby tiptoeing around corners and looking scared. The music is fairly perfunctory too, and the use of silence, which is so great in the early scenes, is replaced with lots of banal dialogue in the second half like this gem: “I’ve got something for you. Say goodnight!”
Kristin Bauer van Straten from True Blood livens things up in the second half as Ms. Burton, and despite her playing a fairly one-note character who gets bad dialogue, cliched situations, and a thankless nod to The Shining in a shot of her staring through a broken door, she is an actress that oozes charisma in everything she does. Lonnie Chavis and Ezra Dewey are additionally both terrific young actors who make the film work as well as it does, and not one but two emotional moments they share at the film’s conclusion have power and depth. (I was also thrilled to see that the black-and-white movie playing in the house wasn’t the public domain Night of the Living Dead for once!)
The Boy Behind the Door isn’t a bad film by any means, and it might be worth a look for horror fans, especially if you subscribe to Shudder. But when it was all said and done, the film felt like an exercise that goes through familiar motions rather than something striking and original to haunt the viewer for days to come. It should be scarier than it is, more raw and unnerving, with genuine tension in that middle half that makes us terrified for Bobby and Kevin. Instead, we get something far too predictable that, again, probably would’ve worked better as a short film than a feature.
