6 months after a car accident that killed Richard Portman (Peter Outbridge) and left Richard's son Stephen (Charlie Heaton) in a vegetative state, Richard's second wife, child psychologist Mary Portman (Naomi Watts) lives in an isolated part of caring for Stephen's needs while also seeing patients at her home. Mary herself is also in therapy via video conferencing with Dr. Wilson (Oliver Platt) as Stephen was having behavioral problems that lead to her deciding to send Stephen away to boarding school which was what lead to the accident. When one of Mary's patients, a young troubled deaf boy named Tom Patterson (Jacob Tremblay), comes to Mary's home she calls the social worker and volunteers to care for him, but he has seemingly fled into the woods during an incoming Winter storm. As Mary wrestles with worry for Tom and authorities having no luck finding him, Mary begins to hear and see things in her home leaving her to believe there's a malevolent presence.
Released in 2016, Shut In was acquired by Luc Besson's joint venture with Relativity, Relativity EuropaCorp Distribution, which was Luc Besson's attempt to gain a foothold in distribution within the United States after having seen profits from Blockbusters such as the Taken franchise and Lucy kept by Fox and Universal respectively. The screenplay for Shut In written by Christina Hodson had appeared on the 2012 Blacklist of best unproduced screenplays, and the script was acquired by Europacorp for development in 2014 when the company was seeking genre fare to build their release slate. Shut In marks the second, and so far last feature film effort of British TV director Farren Blackburn whose work can be seen in The Fades, Doctor Who, and The Musketeers, and also helmed a number of episodes for Netflix Marvel series Daredevil, Iron Fist, and The Defenders. The movie received terrible reviews from critics and audiences and was a commercial dud upon release. Rightly so because Shut In is an absolute mess of a movie and probably one of the worst mainstream horror films of the 2010s.
The movie's first hour is filled with terribly uninteresting melodrama with Naomi Watts saddled with a lead weight of a role (which Watts was in my opinion unfairly nominated for a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress) who's so poorly written that we never actually see her do anything constructive as a child psychologist with almost all of her patient interactions either done off camera or featuring her character distracted and not really doing anything. Watts is clearly trying to give the role something, but the movie is so bereft of anything interesting for the first hour that it ratches up the fake out dream sequences and jump scares to the point the film gets desperate enough to give us a "racoon scare". I can't really go into anymore detail than that, but there's an absolutely ludicrous twist in the movie that only works if several dozen people were blind and/or stupid because there's absolutely no way that what this character does would've been possible to fool this many people who (supposedly) went through an extensive amount of education and certification.
Shut In is absolutely awful. While the movie is well shot and the actors are trying to give something to their thinly written roles, the movie is boring for the first hour then becomes crazy, stupid, and nonsensical in the last 30 minutes. If the movie had been that level of stupid in the last act throughout the entire movie I might've recommended this as a "so bad, it's good" viewing experience, but from its dour tone to its stoic performances the movie just feels boring and never comes to life.
