Cobweb

Sometimes, there's a phone tree among horror critics. Everyone reaches out to everyone else about an upcoming film with a giddy energy. "Did you see it yet?" is the question, and the answer is an equally thrilled yes. It's reserved for those films that truly get under the skin: In recent memory, it's been The Night House and Barbarian. That phone tree has been buzzing over Cobweb, an eerie childhood horror that builds to a truly and brilliantly disturbing crescendo.

It's not like there's been a shortage of horror films about kids dealing with spooky goings-on. Yet most of them follow the model of The Cellar or The Babadook, where parents are caught up in the turbulent wake of preteen terror – and it's all shown from the adult's perspective. Looking through younger, more innocent eyes is more challenging, and not simply because there are different emotional truths to explore. It's because the audience has to remember what it is to be powerless, to have no control. It's what makes child abduction nightmares The Boy Behind the Door and The Black Phone so relentlessly effective if sometimes grueling to watch.

It almost feels like it's a betrayal that Cobweb is set just before Halloween. After all, that's the one time of year that kids can feel safe being scared. But the home of little Peter (the wide-eyed and pallid Norman) looks like a haunted house anyway, with gray patterned wallpaper and a yard full of rotten pumpkins. His parents (Caplan and Starr) are studiously protective in a domineering way, one that explains why Peter is the painfully shy and nightmare-plagued boy that he is – and why he's the one that hears the voice of something in the wall, something that tells him that he's not wrong, that his parents aren't the picture-perfect family they work so hard to portray.

Director Samuel Bodin may arguably still be most famous for co-directing 2008 fan film "Batman: Ashes to Ashes," which applied the Sin City black, white, and red color palette to the mythos of the world's greatest detective. In those 17 minutes, he displayed a mastery of both dread and visual flair, both of which he exhibits again with equal control and creativity, and suitably complemented by the toy box rhythms and playground chants of Drum & Lace (aka Italian sonic artist Sofia degli Alessandri-Hultquist).

But what really makes Cobweb so effective at trapping you in its folds is the creation of a perfectly unstable and unnerving family. Caplan (who hasn't sunk her teeth into horror since Cloverfield) bites deep into the role of Carol, a fairy-tale mother who desperately wants to appear like a normal suburban mom. That sense of forced normalcy is reflected by Starr, who takes the plastic-coated craziness that he brings to the unhinged Homelander in The Boys and wraps it in comfy plaid shirts so that he can pass himself as a regular dad. But it's all too clear that there's something deeply wrong, something that is crawling out from behind the walls and disturbing their well-protected nuclear dream, something that's coming for Peter.

Bodin reveals by inches exactly what that threat is in a fashion that never disappoints (a rarity for such slow burns), and deploys the vocal talents of not one but two seasoned voice actors – Ellen Dubin and Jesse Vilinsky – to bring a subtle complexity to the thing that is only known as the Girl, the thing that whispers to Peter and tells him all his fears about his parents are correct.

Cobweb's greatest achievement is in ambiguity, in leading the story to its inevitable ending without ever sacrificing that unnerving quality. Even the introduction of Coleman as Miss Devine, the compassionate school teacher who seeks to save Peter, never feels like a trite cliche. It's all why Cobweb is this summer's perfect little nightmare.