Horror-thriller ‘Come Play’ is more than just another scarymovie.
A preteen on the autism spectrum, lonely and isolated, becomes the online prey of an unwanted stranger, a monster from another realm.
That’s “Come Play” in one sentence. The results unfold more like a collection of reference points to previous films than a film unto itself. But this PG-13 offering, which opened in theaters Friday as if it were any ordinary, nonpandemic Friday, showcases a filmmaker of legitimate visual skills and a facility for jump-scares cut and timed just so.
The first minute of writer-director Jacob Chase’s Halloween-adjacent thriller makes no mystery about where the wild thing is. A wheezing, rasping creature, unseen, lurks behind an iPhone screen as it streams an episode of “SpongeBob SquarePants,” the go-to show for our hero, Oliver, played by Azhy Robertson of “Marriage Story.”
Larry, the online lurker, feeds on electricity, and can hop from light source to light source, smartphone to tablet. His enticement, which appears on screens unbidden, is a rhyming children’s story about a misunderstood, alienlike being who just wants a companion so he can leave his world and enter the Earth realm.
“Come Play” takes it from there. Olivier’s parents, played by Gillian Jacobs and John Gallagher Jr., argue and furtively plan a separation, driving their son further into his shell. The boy suffers humiliation and bullying from his peers, three of whom are forced to participate in a parent-driven sleepover where skeptics becomes horrified believers in Larry.
Chase puts his young, mostly nonverbal protagonist through the wringer and through ideas borrowed from, among others, “The Ring,” “Poltergeist” and “The Babadook.” That last one, a terrific Australian horror film, works on the same idea of a storybook creation springing off the page and into the home of a mother and a son.
The movie comes from Chase’s more comically inclined five-minute short “Wally,” and while the feature adaptation runs a little long — it’s crying out to be an 80-minute quickie rather than a 105-minute entity — I found Jacobs compelling, even when her character behaves like no parent of a child with special needs should behave. In his frequent, pop- eyed terror, Robertson recalls Danny Lloyd in “The Shining,” albeit in more confined spaces. Chase shoots entire scare sequences inside the parking lot booth where the father works, for example, or in the front seat of a pickup truck.
Even if you don’t love the movie’s rather cruel emotional tactics (what else is new, in horror?) and Olivier’s frequent audible and visible anguish, you can admire the execution. The filmmaker made a previous feature, “The Four-Faced Liar,” a decade ago. He shouldn’t have to wait a decade for his next one, and I’m gratified someone made a movie — derivative yet imaginative — fully exploiting the manic, nightmarish undertones of “SpongeBob.”