Screen time comes alive in ‘Come Play’
“Come Play” is a horror movie whose ideas are better than their execution. h That doesn’t make the ideas any less worthy. In his feature debut, writer and director Jacob Chase expands on his short film “Larry,” which was scary enough but mostly an exercise in creepy atmosphere and gotcha! scares. He’s incorporated the loneliness born of so much time spent looking at screens – smart phones, TVS, computers, whatever – into a physical manifestation: Larry, a monster who lives behind those screens, looking for a companion. Which doesn’t work out so great for the companion.h It’s a brilliant notion, and Chase knows his way around the tropes of horror films.
What’s lacking is the story itself – he takes shortcuts with the narrative. Stuff just kind of happens at various points, important stuff, like the dissolution of a marriage. In a movie about loneliness, which is what “Come Play” is at its core, that would seem like a topic worthy of further exploration.
The film, which opens in theaters Friday, centers around Oliver (Azhy Robertson), a non-verbal autistic boy who uses an app on his phone to communi
cate. He loves “Spongebob Squarepants” but struggles socially at school. He’s bullied by a group of boys led by Byron (Winslow Fegley), with whom Oliver evidently was once friends.
One night Oliver’s phone lights up loaded with an e-book about a creature named Larry, who looks in the drawings kind of like the little brother of the monster from “Alien,” only modestly more humanoid. As Oliver pages through the story, we learn that Larry was once
made fun of because he is different, and he is seeking a friend.
Of course Oliver is lonely and intrigued. But there are lights blinking on and off and things going bump in the night that scare him.
His mother, Sarah (Gillian Jacobs), comforts him. There are intimations that things are not going swimmingly with her and Oliver’s father, Marty (John Gallagher Jr.). These prove accurate when one night Marty leaves.
Wait, what?
Off he goes, in an arrangement worked out with Sarah previously, it seems, a development that typically would disturb Oliver. But he’s got even worse things to worry about at the moment – namely a scary monster that only he can see, and then only if he uses camera functions on his phone or tablet (a good use that allows Chase to frame the action in different ways).
That last is something Marty found at his job, working as a toll collector at a parking garage. After he brought the old tablet home from the lost and found, Oliver immediately commandeers it. Larry’s story shows up there, too, and grows more detailed – and darker.
This is all effective – Chase has worked mostly as an editor, and he is good at setting the audience up.
He’s less effective working with actors – the adult ones, anyway. It’s not fair to say that Jacobs and Gallagher
don’t have much chemistry together; their characters are having problems, after all. But they’re not given much to work with. He’s distant for much of the film (if not absent). Jacobs, meanwhile, is left to navigate Sarah’s complicated emotions and reactions. She’s not bad. She just has to play an arc that is not fully developed, and scream a lot.
But Robertson, who played the boy in “Marriage Story,” manages perfectly the tricky business of communicating without words in even the most horrific circumstances – and the sometimes heartening, sometimes heartbreaking relationship with Byron. The kids are great.
Horror movies are notoriously tough to end well – how can the last act match the lead-up? But credit Chase with coming up with an ending that fits the mood of the rest of the film without selling out the audience emotionally.
“Come Play” is a promising debut, one that makes you interested in what Chase comes up with next.