This was a bit of a miss for me, although it took a while to land there. That opening quote card and credits through the first couple scenes had me getting excited for a fun little movie. Tee'd things up nicely with some cool visuals and interesting flavor. Like that tasty zoom-in from the car up to the house. I was into it, and that's with still having little hang-ups of stuff early on there. There's some broad depictions and beats and characterizations that I should've almost been hating, but I was fully along for the ride.

But then it didn't take too long until I started bumping my head against this movie's low ceiling. I clocked that I started losing traction early on when Maika Monroe started going through the case evidence and then right after when Blair Underwood took her back home to meet his family. Clunky awkward forced stuff that wasn't bringing me along on the larger leaps that it was making there. That set the tone, cuz it was more constant head-bonking for me thru the rest of the movie. Ooo-wee, this is some shoddy-ass police work. Real flimsy stuff. Solo interrogations with the creepy suspect or immediately tearing into new evidence and new crime scenes without ever calling in for backup or the forensics team or whatever. Really veered into dopey THE BLACK PHONE territory for me. Grisly child murders within a cartoon-y simple reality. An R-rated adult Goosebumps or something. Little-to-no actual protein in this meal. Good sauce and seasoning tho.

That thin characterization of Maika and Blair finally ended up feeling pretty played out through the back half too. But there was still a driving momentum to the story that remained pretty compelling. And I was pretty into Cage's wacky fun performance too. I was managing to stay afloat well enough, until we got to the big home stretch finale and there were some even bigger leaps and I had to finally come down into an overall net negative. I got extra listless and then not much in the way of satisfying payoffs, so I guess that ending was a dud for me. All of the psychic sci-fi supernatural flavor getting added into this movie mostly worked against it too? Since it sort of makes anything possible in this world. Like Hanibal Lector wasn't a magic-user. That cheapens all of the police work too. Alicia Witt's pretty game in this, but that character's ultimately a mess for me too. Instant code-breaking and gd Chucky-ass doll gifts and some Jessica Jones-lite touches and wimpy satanic panic. Not very potent stuff. So this had a nice look and some interesting sparks, but was way too flimsy for me on the whole.