Lockbox Review

Fashion designer and author Ellen (Carla Gugino) longs for a simple life after caring for her dying mother. However, her estranged cousin Winthrop (Lou Taylor Pucci) requires temporary accommodation to recover from physical and psychological trauma. Feeling she let him down during his early life, she is compelled to help him.

What starts out as a mutually beneficial symbiotic living arrangement begins to fly off the rails when the braided emotional parasite Vahna (Katharine Isabelle) infiltrates the fragile dynamic. When Vahna disappears under suspicious circumstances, things get totally bonkers with unethical rogue priests with a trolley problem, shapeshifting demonic entities, and a bald kid with god-tier paranormal powers.

Much is being made of the sea change in the development of horror films. The internet is the new breeding ground for would-be auteurs to manifest their aspirations. This phenomenon has reached peak ripeness with the extraordinary financial explosion and pop culture cementation of Curry Barker‘s Obsession. Lockbox continues the trend, this time seeking to mine genre thrills from a different seam of the internet: the horror podcast.

Originally a 2019 episode of the cult supernatural-suspense podcast Knifepoint Horror, the film reconfigures the plot while staying true to its minimalist style and mundanity-morphing-into-madness mantra. Consequently, director Daniel Stamm has crafted a film that stutters and stalls its way to a decent climax that might prove more of a hit with the scrolling generation than older horror fans would like to admit. Kudos to the director for remaining aligned with the source material; however, its staccato delivery and meandering narrative force the audience to scrabble for crumbs of exposition like starving peasants.

SUPPORT US!!! WE ARE A SMALL, INDEPENDENT FILM WEBSITE WITH NO BIG BACKERS, SO IF YOU LOVE OUR SITE AND OUR WRITERS, PLEASE CONSIDER HELPING US TO KEEP FILM JOURNALISM ALIVE!

This demonic psychodrama leaves more loose threads flapping in its wake than a mummy in a wind tunnel. When we do get a clear glimpse of its titular central premise, one that is genuinely fascinating, it evaporates into the ether in a puff of frustration. The performances are weirdly muted, only Katharine Isabelle’s lively turn as the rambunctious Vahna fires the imagination, yet this fits with the original podcast, where the story has one narrator in Soren Narnia and could explain the flat tone, if one were feeling charitable.

Stamm clearly knows all about profit margins; his The Last Exorcism grossed more than $70 million against a $1.8 million budget, and the fact that Lockbox has achieved a cinema release shows confidence in the project. This isn’t a dreadful film; indeed, its non-traditional execution is strangely refreshing, but it’s also a risky venture of kitchen sink drama surrealism that will garner scorn from certain quarters.

This film does contain my favourite line of the year so far when Ellen poses the question “is that normal ?” during a scenario that has already drifted as far south of normal as possible. I also enjoyed the fact that video footage cuts out at the crucial point of demon transference to fit the requirements of the narrative, and absolutely no one at the epicentre of the action even attempts to explain it.

I quite like horror films that stick to their guns no matter how preposterous the bullets they are firing, and this one definitely does just that during a memorable final third. I would argue that Lockbox is a faithful representation of its cult podcast origins rather than a conventional genre picture, and with that in mind, it is worth tracking down.